My future with Patreon (Patreon)

Just to let you all know:

I have received now six e-mails from patrons who are closing their Patreon account in protest against Patreon's 'deplatforming' of several channels, most notably that called 'Sargon of Akkad'.   I have just checked my 'exit surveys' and see that fifteen people in the last week have stopped their patronage of Lindybeige, citing the reason that they have an ideological objection to Patreon's brand of censorship.

I thank all my patrons for their support thus far.  I have always been lucky to have any of you.   I entirely understand and respect the decisions of those who have chosen to stop funding through this platform.

I have written to my contact at Patreon, a delightful lady with whom I have enjoyed a pleasant rapport.  In the e-mail, I gave Patreon an opportunity either to reverse its decision or explain itself to me.  I dare say that Patreon has had many similar messages recently, and it is only fair to give them a while before expecting a reply.  

If Patreon does not make a statement, either to me, or to the wider world, making it clear that it will make commitments to freedom of speech, then I may find that I can no longer continue using its services.  At present, no practical alternative to Patreon exists.  There was once Subbable, but Patreon bought it.  There was StarSubscribe, but that has been crippled by a financial boycott by PayPal.  There is talk of another service springing up to support creators - one run by people who believe in free speech, not just in theory but also in practice.  

For the moment, I am waiting.  Your support paid for a suit of armour.  Without it, I won't be able to do the next similar big project, but I will not starve, and the channel will not die for lack of your funds.  Not in the foreseeable future, anyway.  I don't know how long to wait, and am following events in the hope of a sensible resolution.

I do not want to leave Patreon, but neither do I want to accept that I am working under the constant threat of being denounced as a bad person by anyone on the web who takes exception to something I once said, and then having my patronage taken from me with neither warning nor explanation.  It seems to me better to transition gracefully to another platform.

For the moment, then, nothing is changing, but this is to give you some warning that I may have to do things differently in the not-very-far future.  

Again, I thank you all.  It is wonderful that people can be so giving in this way.

Lloyd (Lindybeige)


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Of course, none of you has been charged for this post.

For the curious, here below is the letter I wrote to my contact at Patreon.  It is long and verbose, but I was straining to be polite.  I did not write it in order to make a pithy public statement, but to set out my position very clearly, also hoping to preserve the rapport I have with a lady who is near-certainly innocent in this matter.  I have removed her name from this copy.


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Dearest X,

I searched for your name in G-mail, and this is the e-mail that popped up first.  I note that your abundantly-helpful reply seems to be the end of the thread.  Could it truly be that I neglected to thank you properly for it?  I'm hoping that I did so in a separate message. 

By coincidence, however, many of the concerns I raised in my e-mail to you have now popped up again, but not within the context of YouTube, but instead within Patreon.  It grieves me that I find myself writing to you at a time of such concern, and not instead when satisfaction with Patreon has driven me to express myself to you.  There is no justice.  Perhaps I shall put an entry in my diary to report to you at some future time, when doubtless all will be well.  Normally, you see, there are not the wrinkles of Patreon-related concern I notice today on my normally smooth and tobogganable brow.

The matter came to my attention when I started receiving e-mails from viewers of my channel.  Each was a stranger to me, and yet each had the same message.  So far, there have been only three, but trickles have a habit of turning into floods.   Each had decided to stop support for my channel through Patreon, in protest against the censorship meted out upon a YouTube channel called Sargon of Akkad.   I learned that his channel's Patreon account had been terminated without warning by some (possibly  junior) workers at Patreon, and that rather than apologise for a mistake, the Patreon management has decided to defend this decision.

It would have been irresponsible of me to write to you before checking the facts of the situation.  Of course, each side will have its own unique perspective on matters, but so far as I can ascertain, the facts are that the reason stated for the draconian step was that ten months ago, on a three-hour-long video on an obscure channel with about 3,500 subscribers, the presenter of Sargon of Akkad used a rude word when describing his opinion of the behaviour of neo-Nazis.  The video received no money from Sargon's patrons at all.  It wasn't even on Sargon's channel.  It therefore, it seems to me, had nothing whatever to do with Patreon.

The terms of use for Patreon make it clear that they refer only to creations supported via Patreon.  Mr Akkad has therefore not violated them.  It is also very suspicious indeed that Patreon was even aware of such a very obscure short segment of such a very obscure, long, and old video.  This is very strong evidence for either (a) Patreon's putting in a great deal of effort to find an excuse for terminating this customer's account, or (b) Patreon's terminating the account, in order to comply with the request of someone who wrote in, denouncing Mr Akkad, and who had put the effort in.   These are not the only possibilities, nor does either seem likely, but they do seem more likely than all the alternatives I can think of.

I see that Mr Akkad has 864,000 subscribers.  I do not know how many supporters he had on Patreon, but I have seen it reported that he was getting about $12,000 a month.  He must have had thousands of patrons.  I wonder, does the number of verified complainants have to exceed the number of supporters for the decision to go against a channel in this way?  

I now find myself in a position in which it would seem an act of moral cowardice to be silent.  So, I must ask you:

(a) Are there really members of staff at Patreon who examine past utterances by everyone benefiting from its system of patronage?  Do they really have the irreversible authority to terminate accounts without warning if they find anything they think might give them an excuse?

(b) Would Patreon really cave in to the demands of an internet snitch, who, for whatever reason, denounced a channel's reputation, even when the complaint is merely against the exercise of free speech?

If the answer to either of these questions even approaches 'yes', then I think it would be obvious to you that I must reconsider my use of Patreon.  

I am not here to defend Mr Akkad.  He is a political chap, and I am not.  I have never met him, though I have once corresponded with him about the history of the Second Punic War.  I do not use the language he uses in some of his videos, nor do I criticise individuals quite so fiercely as he chooses to.  I am sure that he and I would disagree on many things, but that is beside the point. 

My bank does not check through my on-line postings on Twitter to make sure that I have not used any rude words which, if used in the context of a business deal with that bank, would be inappropriate.  Shops that I go to to buy my food do not require me to have no criminal record before allowing me to buy from them.  The police themselves do not scrutinise my activities on the off-chance that I might have once been rude, and if they were told that I had been, I am confident that their first response would not be to imprison me.  

Yes, I do believe that Patreon has the right to choose with whom it does business.  However, I also believe that if Patreon is really a responsible company, it will not seek out excuses to ban people for expressing opinions, even if couched in rude language.  It is meant to be a company that supports artists.  Artists express, and they do it their way.  If Mr Akkad had broken a law, that might be different.  I do not see that he has.  Even ex-convicts are allowed to open bank accounts, however.  If the shame of doing business with anyone who had ever transgressed were really intolerable, then very few people would ever be able to do business with anyone.

Am I being investigated for possible transgressions?  If so, I do not want to live under such a sword of Damacles.  The thought that Big Brother is watching me is not a pleasant one.  What hurts more, though, is the thought, the ugliness of the idea itself, that were someone to write to you saying that they didn't like something I once said, that you, X, would turn out to be not the silken Myfanwy* that I had hitherto imagined, but would instead leave me to my fate, lifting not a finger in my defence.  This experience would not be a first-time for me.  I was once thrown out of my post at a university, because that university received a complaint by e-mail about something I had written many years before on a personal web-site, humorously expressing an opinion about some people's diets.  Rather than simply writing the complainant a polite reply, or possibly better still ignoring the complaint, the university decided to get rid of me.  This act of moral cowardice ended up costing the university quite a lot.  Its PR department was kept busy for about a month just dealing with the fallout.  The story appeared in several newspapers and on local television.  The university, instead of sensibly changing its mind, dug in its heels, and ended up having to invent several lies in order to defend its decision.

I realise upon re-reading, that the end of that last paragraph may have come across as a threat.  It was not a threat.  It was merely some back-story so that you can better understand my worries on this matter.  Freedom of speech is important, but defending it requires some moral backbone.  If a university run by old and supposedly wise heads can prove itself so cowardly, can I trust an internet company run by the comparatively young to behave much better?

Wishing you all the very best that the universe affords,

Lloyd

* "Ring leader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak" - (see http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/790.html),

[snip earlier thread]