I'm not sure exactly why but the permanent suspension of Trump's Facebook & Twitter accounts makes me slightly uncomfortable.
well yeah, agreed - I guess one of the problems with the way the world is in 2021 is that in certain industries/sectors, certain companies are so powerful and have such a monopoly that they can effectively stop or ban things and sometimes have more direct power than legislators themselves.
For example Visa and Mastercard have essentially stopped or vastly altered certain industries overnight by banning payments from them. Poker and online gambling is a prime example of this. Facebook and Twitter have crushed the competition and so they now have vast power. So far they haven't done too much with it in terms of influencing world events - being more concerned with collecting and monetising our data but it could come for sure...
Surely it was the Online Poker Sites (under instruction from the UKGC) who stopped this, not Visa or Mastercard?
Not just in the UK or the US. Lots of countries around where visa/mastercard have stopped doing transactions for online gambling along with highstreet banks and therefore made playing online poker difficult or impossible for players leading to them having to use crypto or going to the darkside of the Chinese apps etc because they can't do their gambling transactions though mainstream means.
Ahh right, understood.
Does a business (be it Visa, Mastercard, Twitter, Pokerstars etc) have the right to refuse to serve those it does not wish to?
Is this Visa/Mastercard thing a real thing? Surely it's just credit card transactions that they've banned and not Visa/Mastercard debit transactions?
Correct - on sites governed by UKGC, credit cards are not allowed but Debit cards are. That's what I assume bergeroo was alluding to.
No that's not what I am talking about. OK I don't want to derail the thread but I will write a bit.
With regards to the visa/mastercard thing and gambling:
1. For example - In Germany it is very common for gambling transactions to be blocked by visa/mastercard. The law there is ambiguous so I guess they are covering themselves, but as visa/mastercard are a virtual monopoly it is kind of the same as a ban.
https://calvinayre.com/2020/05/27/business/german-online-casinos-losing-visa-mastercard-options/2. I had a bank account with an American bank at a branch based in the UK with a visa debit card which I used a for a few online poker transactions with mainstream poker sites and at a casino in Europe. I was kicked out of this bank and banned citing the Patriot Act, even though I had not been to America or used this card with any American companies.
3. Have you noticed how when you deposit or withdraw from a poker site with a bank card it doesn't say Pokerstars, or Party poker? It often says something ambiguous, never mentioning poker or gambling. One recent transaction I had with a very large poker site was just listed as a string of numbers on my statement. Even though poker and gambling is totally legal in the UK, poker sites know that Mastercard and Visa can turn off these deposit methods on a whim, so they don't want to take any chances. I believe Paypal is now not allowed to be used for gambling transactions in the UK, so most gambling payments will now be done with bank cards, therefore Visa/Mastercard have the power to make it very difficult for people to gamble in the UK if they want as they have the de facto monopoly on debit card payments.
You might say, well why would they ever do that? We only need to look at the recent case of Pornhub. Different industry completely but the principal is the same. What happened was that Pornhub removed the majority of the videos it hosted because Visa and Mastercard stopped payment to the site, meaning the only payment methods it could use were crypto currency. Visa/Mastercard reacted to an articles in the media appearing after a lot of lobbying by various protest groups, many of them religious and in my opinion highly dubious.
Talking about this would further derail the thread but there is a very good article here from the Electronic Frontier Foundation - who are the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-are-trying-dictate-what-you-can-watch-pornhubThe article says "Sexual exploitation is a scourge on society that needs resources, education, victim support, and, when necessary, prosecution by responsible authorities to address. Visa and Mastercard are the wrong entities for addressing these problems. Visa and Mastercard do not have the skills, expertise, or position to determine complex issues of digital speech." And "More importantly, as a society, we haven’t given Visa and Mastercard the authority to decide online speech cases. Those companies haven’t been elected or chosen by any electorate in any country."
I very much agree with these quotes. Similar things with visa/mastercard/financial institutions have happened with Wikileaks, with Independent book publishers, legal sex workers and so on. Could easily happen with gambling further around the world.
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I write all these examples to show that firstly, whatever the law is in America can end up rippling out and applying all over the world. And secondly that financial institutions can act as online barrier/restriction because their monopoly can stop activities of their choice by restricting payments when people have no other choice of how to receive them. This is where crypto comes in, but back to the topic...
We can substitute financial institutions for tech companies as we look back to the issue which applies to this thread. Linking back to Trump and his social media accounts / Parler and what has happened in the past week, a problem is thus... The internet is led by America. It was invented there. They have the default .com domain names. A majority of the largest companies, used in the West at least are American. So America has a vast and disproportionate influence on the Internet used throughout the world.
Tikay said "Does a business (be it Visa, Mastercard, Twitter, Pokerstars etc) have the right to refuse to serve those it does not wish to?"
Again on the EFF website, here is a good piece about the 'Speech stack'. Talking about tech companies such as amazon, zoom, facebook and google and how they exercise censorship
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/beyond-platforms-private-censorship-parler-and-stackA website certainly has the choice of who it would like to have as its user. But then if all websites in that sector team up and ban the same person, then that is an outright ban from any form of expression in that medium. And if Twitter or Facebook ban elected Government officials from their sites, now they are also getting into politics and making political decisions. But who made the decision? We have no transparency, we don't know how many individuals were involved. It is opaque and hidden from us who is deciding how and when elected officials can communicate with their citizens. Again, I believe this is troubling.
Then if we look at Parler, the right leaning social media platform. The site hosted a wide variety of hate speech, violent threats and so on. Awful stuff almost all would agree. But instead of certain users being banned from their site, the whole site has been taken down and at the moment has no alternative to get back online. Now you may think that this is correct, but surely this is a very dangerous precedent, decided as it was not by any form of elected institution but by private Silicon Valley tech firms. Twitter/Facebook etc also host a wide variety of violent threats and abhorrent things every day, but they don't result in the whole site being taken down, merely individual users being banned.
I am probably not expressing this very eloquently but what I am trying to say is that Trump being banned from social media and Parler being taken down are not things to be celebrated, they are things that should worry us and could foreshadow other events in the future which could impact us in many ways and probably not for our own good.
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