curate users

[chadwhitacre]

8chan has joined Gratipay. See FD1518 (copied below) and also https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/3032. This brings to a head the discussion we started over a year ago about what kind of userbase we want to cultivate.

My inclination is to start curating our userbase more closely. We want users who align with our mission, to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. However, I'm not going to take any action before we have a conversation on this ticket, and even if a day were enough time (it's not), today is Christmas Eve and I'm offline with my family. I expect tomorrow's payday to include 8chan.

---

Update: The conclusion of this particular ticket was that we would not start curating our user-base based on alignment with our mission. However, we reversed this decision four months later, removing two users (8chan and weev) through an unfortunately idiosyncratic and non-transparent process. Then, a month after that, we went out of business for unrelated reasons, and as part of bouncing back we implemented a proper team review process.

tl;dr We now carefully curate our user-base.

[techtonik]

You can not enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love with force. It requires more than just banning people to sustain.

[colindean]

You can not enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love with force. It requires more than just banning people to sustain.

:+1:

This is a hard problem to address: How do we deal with users of our service who abide by the rules and terms we've set forth to protect our other users and ourselves, but do things we personally don't like outside of our service?

Right now, as written, our Terms and Conditions point #5, "Guidelines for User Generated Content", the result of #1425, seems to govern a user's behavior, but only within Gratipay.com, and specifically any communication facilities that Gratipay.com provides. Right now, that's limited only to usernames, "I"m making the world better by", and any other unvalidated, user-editable field.

A series of questions, expanding as I think of implications:

1. Should Gratipay extend its terms of service to include behavior outside of Gratipay's purview, i.e. gratipay.com, inside.gratipay.com, our GitHub presence, Twitter interaction with us, etc.?
   1. If Gratipay does decide to care about user behavior outside of Gratipay's purview, does that obligate Gratipay to police outside of its world?
      1. Would Gratipay be obligated to do some kind of background check before enabling a user to receive gifts?
         1. Should Gratipay then conduct ongoing background checks to ensure that a user hasn't become evil since signing up?
         2. This could occupy time and resources that Gratipay simply doesn't have available.
      2. If Gratipay does not police, would Gratipay then be obligated to have a mechanism set up for people (not necessarily Gratipay users) to report the terms-breaking activity?
         1. What would the response time look like on this?
         2. Would this diminish the promise of Gratipay as a safe and reliable method of receiving gifts?
         3. What happens if people fraudulently report activity that doesn't actually exist, or is an attempt to frame the user?
         4. What if Gratipay's kneejerk suspension or banning is wrong or erroneous, and we disrupt someone's income stream wrongly?
            1. To what level of legal risk does Gratipay expose itself in the event of erroneous or fraudulent service disruption?
   2. If Gratipay decides not to care about user activities outside its purview, what is its cohesive response to criticism that it is or may be enabling the funding of evil outside of its purview?
      1. What constitutes "evil?"
         1. Ilwill?
         2. Injustice?
         3. Hate speech is already a crime, but a crime with seemingly rare convictions despite being incredibly common online
      2. What does Gratipay have to do?
         1. Legal orders are already covered in the Terms and Conditions (I think? section 12); Gratipay must abide by injunctions and probably even garnishments.
         2. Is Gratipay equipped to assess legal and illegal behavior, and suspend/ban an account ahead of a legal order if Gratipay detects the illegal behavior outside of its purview before law enforcement due process is carried out?
         3. The implications of acting without a legal order return consideration to the above legal risk question.

There are a lot of (bad|good) actors in the world. Sometimes, they get a loud enough voice and enough attention that they can do and say (bad|good) stuff, then ask for money so they can afford to continue to act or speak.

I think Gratipay, specifically the Gratipay team and its community of users, is well within its right to ask bad actors to cease using the service. However, it should not ban them unless they are violating the law or effectively posting on Gratipay's properties content that violates its Guidelines for User Generated Content. Banning bad actors without a legal order may expose Gratipay to legal risk in addition to the social risk it faces by terminating a bad actor's permission to use its service.

I don't think Gratipay should be in the business of deciding what is (bad|good). That's for the legal system and users themselves to decide. This stance could cost Gratipay users, but neutrality is the preference of business when acting any other way could harm the innocent bystander customers of the business, let alone be even more detrimental to the business itself.

[rummik]

A slightly related situation that CloudFlare found themselves in where a client wasn't violating their terms of service, but they didn't particularly like the nature of their client: http://blog.cloudflare.com/58611873/

Snippets of relatable bits from paragraph 4 in the article:

[...] First, CloudFlare is firm in our belief that our role is not that of Internet censor. There are tens of thousands of websites currently using CloudFlare's network. Some of them contain information I find troubling. [...] While we will respect the laws of the jurisdictions in which we operate, we do not believe it is our decision to determine what content may and may not be published. That is a slippery slope down which we will not tread.

So yeah, pretty much just going with what @colindean already stated. Unless there's a violation of the terms, or some other legal reason to remove someone (like Gratipay being put at risk by allowing these transactions to process), I don't think Gratipay can make that decision.

[chadwhitacre]

Copying over from https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1518:

One of the sites on gratipay is known to host exploitative child and teen pictures.

https://gratipay.com/infinitechan/

https://medium.com/@FoldableHuman/the-mods-are-always-asleep-7f750f879fc

This is on top of 8chan being a known board for harassment campaigns and doxxing.

https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/gamergate-harassment

I will not go to the site to get direct links to these events, but I believe that this all violates the TOS of gratipay. Thank you for looking into it.

[seanlinsley]

We are not the government. It's impossible for us to censor them by banning them. They can go elsewhere. We shouldn't accept them after they've been forced off of Patreon simply because we're too unorganized to create and enforce the necessary policy (yes I am volunteering :-).

@colindean could you elaborate on the possibilities for legal risk? Copying from the TOS:

Notwithstanding any of these Terms, Gratipay reserves the right, without notice and in its sole discretion, to terminate your license to use the Site and/or to block or prevent your future access to, and use of, the Site.

That should be updated to say that we will contact them before / upon termination, but it seems pretty clear that we reserve the right to boot people off.

---

Let's take a look at the Patreon community guidelines. This section clearly explains that you're liable to be banned if you do harmful things to people anywhere else outside of Patreon:

Facilitating Harmful or Dangerous Activity:

We don’t allow funds to be collected for organizations that promote, forums that distribute, or anything else that primarily facilitates harmful or dangerous activities. For example, an organization that promotes sexual abuse, intellectual property violations, weapons, commercial spamming, self harm, drug manufacturing techniques, or property crimes would be prohibited from receiving funds through Patreon.

People Who Can’t Use Patreon:

Because Patreon empowers people financially, we impose restrictions not only on the types of media and projects that can be funded on Patreon, but also on which people can and cannot receive funds through Patreon. After creating a Patreon page, any creator caught in the act or convicted of making credible violent threats, committing violent crimes, malicious doxing, coordinating nonviolent harm such as fraud, or encouraging others to do the aforementioned harmful activities may be banned from using Patreon.

People with a dangerous criminal history or known affiliation with violent or dangerous groups including terrorist or cyberterrorist organizations, organized criminal groups, and violent hate groups, cannot receive funds through Patreon, no matter the purpose or apparent intention of their Patreon page. Similarly, anyone who has ever been convicted of child sex abuse, fraud, or money laundering is not permitted to collect funds through Patreon.

This is a good policy, and we should adopt something similar. My only contention with their rules as a whole is on porn, which I think we should allow as long as the individuals aren't violating our other policies. We can get away with this where Patreon can't because there isn't strictly speaking an exchange of goods with Gratipay, whereas Patreon has a Kickstarter-style incentive system to provide donors with actual content.

[chadwhitacre]

An unexpected twist: in researching 8chan, I discovered /christian/, and I am smitten.

[clone1018]

@whit537 8chan is just the reddit of chans. You'll probably find the best this world has to offer and the worst, it's up to the user.

[colindean]

I changed the bullets to numbering in my above post for easier reference to its contents.

@seanlinsley, you're right on with the Patreon policy citation. I think that adopting a policy like Patreon's would take Gratipay down the path of 1.i.b. I'm OK with that, but then we get into outcries of censorship despite being in the right. We will definitely lose some users while also reducing risk created by disallowing users who fall into those categories.

Also, I, too, believe that the termination clause (TOS #13) would cover us, but by clearly stating intentions and exclusions upfront, we certainly mitigate the risk of enraging infringing users and reduce the possibility that such a user might come after Gratipay regardless of the termination clause should they feel they Gratipay has terminated their account wrongfully.

What would really strengthen this policy is citation of statutory and case law for each exclusionary reason, but I'm not sure that's an effective use of time. Also, we non-lawyers are neither qualified or do we have the resources to find specific examples. I'd take it as a challenge myself if I didn't believe it to be incredibly laborious.

[colindean]

Personally, some of the above exclusions are too vague for my tastes.

organization that promotes

• sexual abuse - definitely exclude, pretty well-defined socially and legally, using progressive definitions of abuse :no_entry_sign:
• intellectual property violations - :grey_question:
• Host links or howtos? :ok:
• Host pirated content with no takedown process according to the site's local laws? :no_entry_sign:
• weapons - :grey_question:
• Talks about guns, e.g. NRA? :ok:
• Coordinates a site for gun trading and advocates following laws regarding transfer? :ok:
• Smuggling guns? :no_entry_sign:
• Advocates build WMDs to kill people :no_entry_sign: :no_good: :no_entry:
• commercial spamming - clearly defined :no_entry_sign:
• self harm - :grey_question:
• Techniques? :no_entry_sign:
• Where to get help/counseling? :ok:
• drug manufacturing techniques - information is :ok:
• property crimes - I'm not really sure what this means, other than maybe graffiti :grey_question:

After creating a Patreon page, any creator caught in the act or convicted of making credible violent threats, committing violent crimes, malicious doxing, coordinating nonviolent harm such as fraud, or encouraging others to do the aforementioned harmful activities may be banned from using Patreon.

100% OK with this, because they are all clearly defined in legal terms. Fraud can be little more unclear, and I think that's one we'd have to act only on conviction. Maybe Gratipay needs a part of its terms that more clearly indemnifies Gratipay in the event of fraud and protects Gratipay against chargebacks resulting from a user's feeling defrauded.

People with a dangerous criminal history or known affiliation with violent or dangerous groups including terrorist or cyberterrorist organizations, organized criminal groups, and violent hate groups, cannot receive funds through Patreon, no matter the purpose or apparent intention of their Patreon page.

Gratipay is not equipped to define these, so we'd have to decide on someone else's list. US State Dept List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations would suffice internationally, and we're technically required by law not to do anything with them. Hate groups defined by the SPLC is a good list for that one.

Would we permit a user who claims to associate with Anonymous? What about other domestic organizations that are considered by some to be terrorists, such as eco-terrorists?

Similarly, anyone who has ever been convicted of child sex abuse, fraud, or money laundering is not permitted to collect funds through Patreon.

100% agreement with excluding those convicted of fraud or money laundering. I hate child sex abuse just as much as any rational person, but when state courts are convicting without the presence of or under antiquated Romeo and Juliet laws, I rollback that agreement to a case-by-case basis, defaulting to excluded.

Determining with whom one can do business is hard, especially when one wants to be upfront about it.

[chadwhitacre]

@colindean Thanks for the thorough taxonomy in https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/118#issuecomment-68072765.

[colindean]

a little attention from twitter: https://twitter.com/feedmeyourtears/status/548890123249909760

[seanlinsley]

Also in Freshdesk (login required):

• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1533
• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1534

[chadwhitacre]

FD1533 is a +1 for removing 8chan.

FD1543 is the follow-up from https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/118#issuecomment-68188011 re: RHExcelion.

[chadwhitacre]

I've asked for permission to copy comments from both FD1533 and FD1534 over here.

[chadwhitacre]

As a basis for comparison, I started looking into what PayPal does. Here's their Acceptable Use Policy, and here's the eBay/PayPal Law Enforcement Center. They use a third party called LeadsOnline.

[chadwhitacre]

Three examples from eBay of ways they've worked with law enforcement:

http://ebay.com/securitycenter/Blotter.html

[chadwhitacre]

eBay in legal wrangling over who is responsible for fencing:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/163535/article.html

[chadwhitacre]

2011 fact sheet about PROACT (PDF):

http://nasp.creativeimagewebsites.com/pdf/2011%20Proact%201%20Page%20Handout%20Gov%20Relations.pdf

[chadwhitacre]

From [FD1533]():

Hello. I thought you might want to be made aware that one of your users is fundraising money for a website that breaks at least these terms of service:

Campaign: https://gratipay.com/infinitechan/

1. Defame, abuse, harass, stalk, threaten or otherwise violate the rights of others.
2. Post content or imagery that is offensive and/or harmful, including content that promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind against any individual or group of individuals.
3. Post content that provides materials or access to materials that could be used to exploit minors in an abusive, violent or sexual manner.

In the past few months alone, 8chan or infinitechan has been the headquarters for a known group of harassers - GamerGate. They recently also became home to a group called "pol" which is known white supremacists. As well, the owner of 8chan has stated that he will begin writing for known white nationalist website, Daily Stormer.

This website is used regularly to coordinate threats, doxing attempts, and launch large scale harassment campaigns.

It has also been recently linked as a hub for child abusers & pedophiles to share images & stories of acts with minors.

https://medium.com/@FoldableHuman/the-mods-are-always-asleep-7f750f879fc

It was also shown to contain similar just a few months ago:

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/8chan-pedophiles-child-porn-gamergate/

And here is the owner saying that he can't manage to compete with a site like 4chan without allowing such content:

https://twitter.com/HW_BEAT_THAT/status/547013158116663296

A cursory view of the website listed on the campaign should give you plenty enough information about the kind of content being cultivated, and how the owner of the website specifically & monetarily benefits from hate speech, borderline illegal child pornography, and white nationalists (aka neo-nazis).

He was also recently kicked off of Patreon for these very things, because they refused to be associated with such a toxic website.

I just wanted to give you a heads up about this company and its owner. Thank you for your time.

Then:

Oh, and I realized I forgot to add this screenshot about his new involvement in TheDailyStormer: http://i.imgur.com/PV9KDaf.png https://archive.today/NMGM9

[chadwhitacre]

From [FD1534]():

The account in question is owned by RHExcelion. He runs a fairly large operation that takes streamed content from media providers (generally Funimation or Crunchyroll) and illegally redistributes it. Then he asks for donations to continue doing so (this is where gratipay comes in).

This is the post on his site where he talks about soliciting the donations: http://commiesubs.com/state-of-the-cartel-2015/

As you can see, he references that PayPal could shut him down at any time, which they do... often... because the kind of redistribution he does violates copyright law. He has also had his accounts banned from Flattr and Patreon for the same reasons.

If you want more detail around the quality of his character, a large portion of the money he acquires for such donations go to vacations, so he's even scamming his donators. Here's one conversation around it:

Dec 31 22:42:31 <BardicheAssault> Also the first jimmy wales donation drive was spent on madoka trip to nyc and I want to do something similar for axpo
Dec 31 22:42:41 <&herkz> wow that sounds really useful
Dec 31 22:42:43 <&herkz> oh wait
Dec 31 22:42:45 <&herkz> not at all
Dec 31 22:42:47 <&herkz> what the fuck
Dec 31 22:43:21 <&herkz> why the hell would you spend donation money on that
Dec 31 22:43:29 <BardicheAssault> I paid for food and hotel for like 6 people
Dec 31 22:43:36 <BardicheAssault> Why not

Apologies for the length, but I thought it'd be better to be more thorough than not.

Then:

For what it's worth, on the curation front, when I brought this issue to my readers' attention, one of them tweeted me with "Imagine all the other accounts that are really fronts for drug dealing & such..." I imagine others could get that impression too. Anyway, just food for thought on that end as well.

[colindean]

I wonder if there can be some process here kinda like DMCA Safe Harbor, where if we receive an accusation/evidence of badness, we can suspend the account and pass that to the accused, who can counter-notice or roll over. If they counter-notice, we’re absolved of any wrongdoing and let the court decide. If they roll over, well, that’s the end of it.

The missing piece here is that copyright is a civil matter, and the submitter is supposed to be the owner of the copyright, who can then sue if they receive counter-notice.

The RHExcelion one leans toward civil behavior that is addressable by vigilance on the part of the copyright holder. I feel like the copyright holder would be within their rights to enjoin Gratipay from facilitating gifts to the user in question as a part of legal action against them.

The 8chan one, however, leans toward criminal behavior. I think that’s something that we might have a something (obligation? duty? preponderance of financial evidence?) to provide law enforcement with what it needs to investigate.

I’m not sure of the action here. I think we should continue to research other money transmitters’ policies, and seek the counsel of both Balanced, since they’re our real transmitter, and some lawyers of our own.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm not a white nationalist (I live in Philippines lmao).

Here's what happened:

[...]

Now, of course certain people have come out of the woodwork to call me a Nazi, but that was exactly as planned. You guys need to realize that I'm the admin of 8chan, not the "leader" of GamerGate. Building hype around my business is my job, especially when we are strapped for cash and can't advertise directly.

http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2qlpst/hotwheels_gets_invited_to_write_an_article_on/cn79uo2

and, thank you gamerghazi for hyping my article before it goes out are you really surprised the owner of a chan is trolling? really?

https://twitter.com/HW_BEAT_THAT/status/549104955001303040

[Changaco]

What goes on outside of Gratipay is not our problem. What people do with the money received through Gratipay is not our problem. What people post on 8chan is not our problem. Copyright infringement is not our problem unless it happens on Gratipay itself. Etc.

I am against curating users. It would consume time and create conflicts within the team (there will inevitably be disagreements on whether a particular user should be banned or not).

[rohitpaulk]

I'm with @Changaco on this. (As long as it makes legal sense of course)

[DSRK]

If you guys want to be known as the premiere money laundering service, I guess that's your call. I imagine it'd be profitable.

Just seems to me that if certain people are too toxic for even one of ThePirateBay co-founder's side projects (flattr), there's probably a good reason for that.

[Changaco]

This discussion is not about money laundering, we already try to prevent that by blacklisting suspicious accounts, and payment processors also have their own algorithms that try to detect frauds.

[chadwhitacre]

@Changaco I was about to make a similar reply, but then started down this rabbit hole on Wikipedia:

Money laundering is the process in which the proceeds of crime are transformed into ostensibly legitimate money or other assets.

Gratipay isn't useful for money laundering in the narrow sense, because we only offer soft anonymity, not strong anonymity. If law enforcement comes to us with an investigation, we do have useful information we could provide.

However, in a number of legal and regulatory systems the term money laundering has become conflated with other forms of financial crime, and sometimes used more generally to include misuse of the financial system [...], including terrorism financing, tax evasion and evading of international sanctions. Most anti-money laundering laws openly conflate money laundering (which is concerned with source of funds) with terrorism financing (which is concerned with destination of funds) when regulating the financial system.

What are our obligations regarding detecting other sorts of financial crime besides money laundering in the narrow sense?

[chadwhitacre]

"International Standards on Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism & Proliferation" http://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/recommendations/pdfs/FATF_Recommendations.pdf

[Changaco]

I think our obligations are the same as Paypal, we offer a similar service, financially speaking. Maybe Balanced would be able to tell us if there's something we're not doing that we're supposed to do. In any case this should be discussed in another issue.

[chadwhitacre]

Agreed, AML/CFT is a separate issue. There are two lines: legal and (I suppose) moral. This ticket is about the moral line.

The text reads "Everyone," "Unsavory," and "Criminal," and "Not to scale!" :-)

We have to deal with the moral line in a way that PayPal doesn't for two reasons:

1. We are social. There are no public profiles or other communication features baked into PayPal.
2. Idealism is part of our brand. PayPal's mission is to build the Web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution. Ours is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.

Notice that both lines are fuzzy.

[chadwhitacre]

I guess we could even say that morality is part of our brand, not just idealism. Gratitude, generosity, and love are moral terms. @turnshek called this, btw. He pointed out in conversation once that Google gets burned all the worse for having promised to not "be evil," and a similar dynamic seems to be playing out for Gratipay.

[DSRK]

Well if you're trying to be moral, I imagine it would be hard to square those ideals with financially supporting people who profit off of IP theft and scamming their user base.

And I don't think militant amorality is the way to acquire a user base that supports gratitude, generosity, or love.

[colindean]

Like all businesses, Gratipay must balance morality with legality and due process. Ethics is hard and as a young company with virtually no budget, Gratipay is wise to consider deeply the best course of action instead of a kneejerk reaction that sends the userbase and public into a furor.

Theoretically, under Gratipay's termination clause, Gratipay could terminate these accounts with the click of a button and such would save us all a lot of discussion and braintime, at the expense of finding a solution that is at equilibrium with the company's guiding principles, user expectations, social expectations, legal obligation.

[Changaco]

There is no such thing as "IP theft", it's copyright infringement, and copyright is not something I want to defend.

[chadwhitacre]

Gratipay could terminate these accounts with the click of a button and such would save us all a lot of discussion and braintime

We could also save ourselves the discussion and braintime by ignoring these accounts, but I think we should follow through. We started this conversation over a year ago in https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/1425, and in various forms it has soaked up a lot of our energy in 2014. I would like to see us reach a conclusion.

I imagine it would be hard to square those ideals with financially supporting people who profit off of IP theft and scamming their user base.

To me, "financially supporting" someone means actually giving money to them. I don't personally, and Gratipay as a team doesn't, give any money to RHExcelion. Providing a way for others to give money to RHExcelion is a step removed from "financially supporting." In 1.ii we're calling it "enabling."

Now, Gratipay's mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. Different people will understand this in different ways, and that's okay: even shifting the debate to what "gratitude, generosity, and love" means would be a clear win. In order to justify removing RHExcelion, 8chan, or any other character who is "unsavory" from one point of view, I suppose it would have to be shown that enabling RHExcelion, 8chan, et al. actively interferes with Gratipay's ability to also enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love from another's point of view.

And here we're at a crossroads, and we have to make a decision. Because it's true that, for some people, the mere presence of certain others does represent such a threat, such a source of pain and anxiety and fear, as to inhibit their ability to participate fully, to function on the higher level of gratitude, generosity, and love that we're aiming for. Are we going to try to keep unsavory elements off of Gratipay for the sake of the people whom the unsavory elements painfully offend by their mere presence?

Framed as such, my answer is no. At a certain point, my pain and fear is my problem, no one else's. We're not here to force anyone to interact with anyone else (cf.), and if/when we bring more communication features online, we'll have to pay close attention to implementing proper anti-harassment tools. But, part of Gratipay's moral vision is that we embrace and work through the most painful tensions in our society, rather than avoiding them. In that spirit, everyone may be at least minimally present on Gratipay.

Practically speaking, this is actually a similar position not just to banks and PayPal, but also to Facebook and Twitter and other large social networks. 8chan and RHExcelion are both on Twitter, for example, yet Twitter is able to also provide value for many, many others who would find these accounts abhorrent.

However, unlike Twitter, we're not staking out a "free speech" position. We're deepening our "openness" position. Genuine human contact! Truly engaging one another! That's what "openness" is about for Gratipay: being open to one another, even—especially—those that offend me. Why? Because closing ourselves off from one another is a sign of fear, and fear is the opposite of love, and we're trying to enable an economy of love, because love is life, and fear is death, and death is bad, and life is good.

This gets at a much larger vision, of course. Gratipay can only do so much. Reining this back in, then, here's what I propose:

1. Unsavory people are absolutely welcome on Gratipay. Criminals, even. Everyone is welcome! :dancer:
2. Unsavory behavior is not welcome on Gratipay. We've already defined "unsavory behavior" for both users (§5) and contributors. We're not going to have /pol/ or /younglove/ communities on Gratipay.
3. Criminal behavior is, of course, unwelcome on Gratipay (see #119).

I'm going to leave this ticket open for a little while longer to allow responses. If you are -1 on my decision then you have to convince me that "enabling RHExcelion, 8chan, et al. actively interferes with Gratipay's ability to also enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love" for others, recognizing that you or others being painfully offended is not sufficient.

It could be the case that Gratipay becomes so associated with unsavory characters that we're unable to attract and retain "normal" people, which could hurt us in our mission by driving away everyone but the 8chans and RHExcelions. On the other hand, any publicity around this seems just as likely to attract people who share our particular commitment to openness in pursuit of love, and they're the ones that we'll be giving full voice to on Gratipay via the communities feature, etc., so the threat of brand damage is also not sufficient.

[DSRK]

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here, but why wouldn't /pol/ or /younglove/ be allowed here? All the unsavory behavior is happening elsewhere; you'd only be enabling it. So what's the core difference here, and how is it defined? The links you provided only seem to refer to content generation or communications that occur via the Gratipay platform rather than what occurs as a result of said enablement.

[chadwhitacre]

@DSRK While it's true that we don't currently have much in the way of user-generated content (besides profile avatars/bios), we are looking at eventually making the community pages more communal (https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/967). However, I would construe organization of communities even in their present attenuated form as "communications that occur via the Gratipay platform," because organization of communities is purely user-driven: all our communities are created by our users. Since communities are user-generated, they're subject to our Guidelines for User Generated Content: we're not going to have communities on Gratipay that are organized around, for example, racism (a la /pol/) or pedophilia (a la /younglove/). Am I answering your question?

[twiko]

It's worth noting that DSRK has a personal vendetta against RHExcelion/Commie Fansubs, which is probably why he's trying to get them banned.

[DSRK]

@whit537 Not really. Seems to me as long as they don't create a community and just use your site for funding purposes they'd be fine. Or am I misinterpreting something?

[clone1018]

I happened across a link to an internal discussion of @Gratipay's about whether to allow a child porn website to receive funding through their site. It's very candid and transparent, which I really appreciate, so I don't want to call any extra attention to it, but I would like to consider the following scenario- You see a man running down the street, drenched in blood, clutching a knife, pounding on every door as the sound of sirens approach. Everyone so far has turned him away. He reaches your door, begging to be let in, to hide from his pursuers. You can make the argument that he may not have just murdered someone, and you can argue that if he keeps trying inevitably SOMEONE will let him in, so you may as well be the one for him to show gratitude towards, but the reality is, you know it's wrong to harbor him, and you are destroying the fabirc of society if you rationalize immoral behavior by rationalizing what you know is wrong by imagining some hypothetical neighbor who would do the wrong thing too. And even if we look at this in purely legal terms, rather than basic human decency, there's that whole "aiding and abetting" concept. Child porn in particular is such a radioactive concept in the U.S. legal system I'd sure as hell never set foot into any sort of grey area.

From: https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl

[colindean]

That's an interesting scenario to consider.

Forgive me, as I do sometimes overthink scenarios such as these.

I question if I am sufficiently confident in my ability to protect myself and my family, should I decide to let the bloody man into my home. Though, my particular home lends itself to such, given a porch with two bolted doors and a window through which a phone could be passed so that this bloody person could call 911 at the same time my family is calling 911. The hero part of my brain says to me, maybe this person is running from someone who tried to kill them, but the attacked defeated his assailant and is now afraid of the sirens, not realizing self-defense? Let the guy call 911, or perhaps get him to simply drop the knife?

Or maybe he is the assailant. Maybe he's looking for somewhere to hide until the sirens pass, and looking for some poor fool to give him harbor.

Most folks would probably not open their doors, because they simply don't want to become involved. Too much blood, too many police, too much thinking.

The funny thing about Gratipay is that is has chosen for its doors to be open to everyone at all times, murderers and saints alike, as long as they're not murdering inside its metaphysical walls. Whether or not that's good for business is not yet fully understood and I think this issue is trying to hash that out.

Gratipay is not funding these questionable sites, but rather acting as a platform that enables others to do so. As long as an individual user is gifting or receiving legally and within the terms of service, Gratipay has no reason to terminate their account. Gratipay is not a court, so it cannot determine what is legal or not. Gratipay can only react to legal orders, or potentially suspend an account and notify authorities if a user is clearly engaging in illegal behavior via Gratipay. Gratipay has a legal duty to reasonably monitor for illegal behavior, but so does Balanced, and so do Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and any other company involved in the transfer of money from one person to another.

As an aside, has anyone thought to contact the authorities about these sites in question? Surely, if there are illegal activities, then law enforcement would be interested, and Gratipay would be obliged to terminate accounts if ordered by a court to do so. Gratipay may even be obligated to pass on these reports to authorities as a "we believe this user may be doing something illegal, but they're using our site legally, so you might want to look into it so that we can terminate their account if you find that they're going something illegal."

The Gratipay mentality prescribes changing minds rather than proscribing behavior. I think Gratipay would rather an unsavory user be stocked in the public square and lose their support of gifters' own volition, than unilaterally terminate an account because of a few reports of unsavory behavior from folks who may have their own agendas, biases, resentments, etc. In the case where there is actual illegal behavior, Gratipay reports it and acts as instructed. This may not satisfy the bloodlust of the aggrieved, but it is, to my understanding, the right way to ensure fairness: through the existing legal system.

Let me abundantly clarify something, so that there is no suspicion. I will not convey in a public forum how child sex abuse and all the things that go with it have negatively affected me. There is nothing that I detest more. Gratipay must tread lightly, but deliberately and confidently, and I feel that it is doing so.

[tshepang]

good points @colindean

[blrhc]

We cannot allow Gratipay to become a service where illegal or even immoral platforms are funded. Gratitude, generosity and love should not be illegal, and we should make decisions on an individual basis if possible concerning these projects.

We need to remember that we want users who are "making the world better by..."

Freedom of speech and transparency are good. Child pornography, drugs and violence are not, and I think in many situations, we are actively qualified to decide this.

[Daiz]

I'm in favor of having both the discussed cases (8chan and RHExcelion) to remain on the site. While I personally don't like what RHE is doing (seemingly using donation money for non-stated personal purposes), this is all off-site behavior and ultimate what I see as something that needs to be sorted out between RHE and his donors. After all, they can stop sending him money whenever they want to.

With 8chan, I'm happy to see that most seem to be in favor of not kicking them off Gratipay, but I would also like to bring up a couple things related to the whole "child porn" thing. First off, here's what 8chan itself says on the matter: https://8chan.co/obscenity.html

As the page says, 8chan works like Reddit in that anyone can create a board, much like anyone can create a subreddit. Illegal content, including child porn, is removed as reported, and whole boards can and do also get removed and banned for it. (As a sidenote, all content on 8chan is ephemeral in nature - threads expire eventually and get automatically deleted.) Claiming that the site harbors or encourages posting (or whatever else) child porn is nothing but a smear attempt, when in reality the site not really any different from Reddit in terms of "icky" speech (I mean, NSFW /r/lolicons NSFW exists, as do many other "morally questionable" subreddits), and when it comes to that, here's Neil Gaiman on why defend freedom of icky speech.

[chadwhitacre]

The funny thing about Gratipay is that i[t] has chosen for its doors to be open to everyone at all times, murderers and saints alike, as long as they're not murdering inside its metaphysical walls.

Yes! Thank you, @colindean.

After all, they can stop sending him money whenever they want to.

Yes, that's the proper thing to do if I don't like how a receiver on Gratipay is spending their receipts.

Freedom of speech and transparency are good. here's Neil Gaiman on why defend freedom of icky speech.

As mentioned above, Gratipay isn't defending freedom of speech, nor transparency for its own sake, and we do censor content on Gratipay. By choosing to allow "murderers-not-murdering" on the site, we are deepening our commitment to openness, by which we primarily mean openness to one another, even murderers-not-murdering.

From: https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl

Do you have a link to where this was posted publicly, @clone1018? I.e., did you have permission to share that? I checked her tumblr.

As an aside, has anyone thought to contact the authorities about these sites in question?

Reticketed for 8chan as #121. The RHE case sounds like inside baseball.

Gratipay may even be obligated to pass on these reports to authorities

Reticketed as #122.

[chadwhitacre]

@DSRK @twiko It looks like you maybe created GitHub accounts in order to participate in this conversation, yes? That's awesome! Welcome to GitHub, and welcome to Gratipay! :-)

[Daiz]

As mentioned above, Gratipay isn't defending freedom of speech, nor transparency for its own sake, and we do censor content on Gratipay.

I would say free speech is still related to the matter at hand, because people are asking Gratipay to kick 8chan out because "other people use 8chan to say things I don't like", or in other words, "I want to punish these people for their icky (but legal) speech (outside Gratipay's site)". As 8chan has been operating out in the open for quite a while and hasn't been shut down by any authorities (who should be well aware of the site's existence), I don't believe there to be any reason to kick the account off for any legal reasons, thus any action you take on this case will be considered from a free speech angle one way or another.

[DSRK]

@Daiz- And how exactly are you going to bring that to the donors' attention? We've known each other for a while, but I've never known you to stick your neck out for anything. We can continue this on Twitter, if you want. Don't wanna clog up this discussion.

@whit537 You've made your decision clear so I'll respect that and leave this to the legal teams, per @colindean 's suggestion. You didn't exactly answer my question in comment #68331266 about /pol/ and /younglove/ though. As long as all sexism, racism, and pedophilia is occurring off-site, and no communities are being created around it on Gratipay, wouldn't enabling said behavior be part of how you interpret your mission statement? Assuming your mind hasn't changed since @benhc123 's comment, that is.

And thanks for the welcome.

[colindean]

Do you have a link to where this was posted publicly, @clone1018? I.e., did you have permission to share that? I checked her tumblr.

This tweet thread.

[techtonik]

Haters gonna hate. It is in firmware, and I doubt that there is some newer version that allows a person in hate mode to love their enemies. Applications like Gratipay can have workarounds, but there is no solution if the circuits are jammed. Hate is like a sport, a hunt or a game, because satisfaction is unlikely to last for long - once the target is down, it is time for another one. By doing stuff as haters say, the Gratipay will soon become an inquisition platform in the name of love. If you are in the game, it is easy to miss the big picture, that's why there should be a big picture at the top of any solution that will follow.