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I think WordPress as a private company can refuse service to whomever they like. There’s a big difference between a company not selling you something versus the government censoring you.

The complicating issue is that we are ceding more and more control of our public spaces to private companies. So, on one hand, a place like Twitter should be able to ban whomever they want, while on the other hand, at what point does not having access to Twitter represent a de facto censorship of public speech? I don’t think we’re there yet (or really all that close), but we’re headed in that direction.

6 comments

> I think WordPress as a private company can refuse service to whomever they like

I'm perfectly fine to apply this standard. But I think very few people making that point in this content, are willing to bite the bullet and say the same thing when a redneck, homophobic baker refuses service at a gay wedding.

(And yes, in California, political affiliation is a protected class, just like LGBT status.)

Should I be able to enforce a code of conduct in my store? It’s closer to ejecting a patron for shouting racial slurs at the top of their lungs.

Doing a cursory skim, the actual blog content seems alarmist but probably not violating. The comments are a trash fire with lots of blatant calls to violence. I suspect they’re in trouble for that but would likely find the comment moderation Wordpress is asking for to be against their principles.

Why not just bake the cake tho bigot?

But in seriousness, we've all heard this argument. What's interesting about this idea is that we're hearing leftists shill for corporations at levels previously thought impossible. The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?"

> The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?”

I guess I’d say that the real question is kind of in-between those two. We need to permit somethings to be allowed, which are not good, right, and proper.

> What's interesting about this idea is that we're hearing leftists shill for corporations

This is unnecessarily inflammatory.

> The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?"

If leftists thought that way, they wouldn't be leftists. I'm sure a lot of people will find that offensive, but it really is in the left's political DNA, which is why you see bumper stickers like "Well-behaved women seldom make history."

I don't think we're far from this at all. The Twitter issue is different from the CTH issue covered here; the issue with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube is that when you're kicked off those platforms, you lose your only real hope of a revenue stream. This has happened to a number of conservative notables, content creators, etc. I think we are already at a point where these companies are so big and powerful that being shunned by one could put you out of business.

Yeahhhhh, given that the platform here is an install of an open-source CMS, which is presumably managed by a site admin, I personally wouldn't compare them to Twitter in the first place. WP straight-up describes the service as hosting in the letter cutting them off.

But what does get problematic is when your service is an auth provider for numerous others, and a major communication hub in itself, and it becomes possible for you to just suddenly get locked out half your life all in one fell swoop.

WP mostly sidesteps this issue, being an open source project that you're free to just host an instance of yourself. But consider Facebook, with a chat service that's more than a decade old and that covers a quarter of the planet -- and the reaction you would have if an equivalent platform were to lock you out of emails spanning that kind of time frame. Particularly given that it's a closed protocol, and as such any ability you do have to export that data is really only useful for archiving.

I agree, I didn’t mean to give Twitter as a completely analogous example, there are definitely differences that arise from the different services offered

I hear this argument a lot, and I think you are missing a piece of the collective which is that we do already all agree on many things such as anything that can be misconstrued as child porn. I think there is a serious argument to be made for individual cultures and individual groups such as families who would want more choices for control, but I think the slippery slope argument doesn't really hold muster.

This incident is a different discussion because while Twitter aggregates an audience, WordPress doesn't---it makes no difference to the readers if the site changes its host.

The discussion that would be germane is what infrastructure do we consider should be available to all, without regards to (legal) content. Colo? IaaS? PaaS? Access to payment networks?

Yes, good point. The different services offered might have different implications.