> Patreon signed its own death warrant when it started censoring certain artists and creatives it deemed to be "unacceptable".

If they did, then I, for one, am completely OK with that. It's a business and if deciding to limit their business dealings with only certain people puts them underwater, then that's a decision that they should be allowed to make.

In every population there are distinguishing features of it's populace. One person is blue, another is green, a third is purple. It is possible to discriminate who you interact with. Perhaps I only want to interact with blue people, or I specifically don't want to interact with purple people. For the blue or purple people, this may suck, but in reality this is actually the norm. Businesses regularly discriminate based on how much money people are willing to spend :-). Certain establishments may have dress codes. There may be rules that people carrying weapons are not allowed on the premises, even if those people are usually allowed to carry weapons. While I intentionally encoded the populace as blue, green and purple colours, I could assign blue = has at least $100 to spend, green = wears clothing, and purple = not carrying a weapon. I can legitimately discriminate based on these things and the law will back me up for the most part (just try sitting around in a Michelin restaurant with no intention to buy anything -- the police will eventually cart you away).

Discrimination gets even more complicated. While we may have blue, green and purple people, we will also have people who hate blue, green or purple people. It might be a bit strange to insist that a customer be poor or that they must carry a weapon, but it's not actually unheard of for a nude beach to insist that the visitors are nude (although that may not fly in some parts of the world).

So as well as being able to choose that I will only sell to you if you are blue, green or purple, I can reasonable say that I won't sell to blue people, or I won't sell to green people. This is, of course discrimination, but as the difference between "will" and "won't" is a logical operation, it's easy to flip our logic. Blue = does not have money, Green = is wearing clothes, and Purple = is carrying weapons. I will say that I not service those people and that's entirely legitimate pretty much anywhere in the world.

So why are we up in arms about discrimination? Because for people who are denied service it sucks. Sometimes we take a category of people and we say, "You aren't allowed to discriminate based on this".

Unfortunately, we do sometimes run into problems and especially we run into problems when a culture has historically treated a certain category of person extremely poorly, the culture tends to continue to do so unthinkingly. So it makes a great deal of sense to choose certain categories and say, "You are not allowed to discriminate based on this" or even "You must discriminate based on this" (remember, "not allowed to" and "must" are essentially the same thing with the logic of the action inverted).

Now, it is categorically not sensible to extend this to all forms of discrimination. A restaurant can't operate if it must provide service to people who won't pay, for example. There is a certain amount of discrimination that must occur in order to provide meaningful service. It's completely unreasonable in the general case to say, "You must never discriminate" (which is the same as "You must always discriminate" -- again, just by moving where you put the "not" in your sentence).

This is especially true because, as I said, for everything you can discriminate about, you can also discriminate on the opposite. You can't simultaneously satisfy the people who believe that nobody should be nude and the people who believe that some people should be allowed to be nude. You have to pick one or the other. In most places in the western world, it defaults to "nobody should be allowed to be nude" and society encourages this discrimination, much to the chagrin of nudists.

When we talk about deplatforming, it can be a serious problem. Imagine if a group of people decided that women should not be able to raise funds. They may be able to band together and ensure that it was impossible. This would have a seriously bad effect on society. That's why there is a law that says you can't do this with respect to the category of gender (in most countries). Similarly in most countries you can't do it based on race, or religion or sexual orientation.

But don't be fooled! It is only a very small selection of categories that are protected! In many places in the world, it is impossible to get a bank account if you are not a resident. It's quite a reasonable requirement after all and stops a lot of money laundering. But, as an immigrant, I can tell you that getting your first bank account set up in a foreign country can be a harrowing experience -- and it can seriously impact your life. However, on balance, the advantages of the discrimination probably outweigh the disadvantages which is why almost no country has laws about that kind of thing.

And this, in a nutshell, is why I think it is completely reasonable for Patreon to choose who they do business with, as long as they aren't discriminating against a category that is protected by the society in which they operate.