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The impact of Willowdale discovering you are gay and ejecting you is limited specifically because they (I assume) don't maintain a blacklist in coordination with Springfield.



I mean, they might ban someone, and as long as their reasons don't pertain to protected classes does it still matter? Do you have a right to go to any Odd Fellow meeting, anywhere? Or do they have a right to choose who they consider to be members? I don't really know much about Odd Fellows, if they did have national/global membership rosters, would that then change this scenario to you?

Seriously, do you feel the private organization should be able to choose who can be a member or not? Generally speaking, not trying to bring any particular protected class.

Say the Odd Fellows club did ban me, globally. Maybe I had friends I knew through the club. Does the fact I have friends who meet in the club let met petition the government to do violence against the group to enforce my ability to go to the meetings despite the leadership of the group not wanting me there?

Should a church be required to accept everyone in their services, even if that person is running around the room screaming "God is a lie! God is a lie!" Should a restaurant be required to seat every potential customer, even if that customer orders an ice water and starts screaming profanities and making other customers uncomfortable?

Why can't Discord decide to exclude those which abuse their platform?


You seem to miss that Discord is excluding people who are not abusing their platform.


This original post is someone using their phone number for two accounts. Having multiple accounts is against their rules, so it's abuse of their platform.

Another user talking about being banned from Discord was supposedly involved with a server trading child pornography and then continuing to get banned by creating additional accounts which is once again against Discord's terms.

I'm not seeing a lot of examples of people truly getting banned for no reason. It's not my place to tell Discord what is and isn't abuse of their platform. They're allowed to make their own membership rules.

But please, answer my question. Is discord allowed to exclude those who they feel abuse their platform? That's kind of the key point here.


A private organization should be able to do what they like, provided they have not acquired enough market power to be acting in the role of a public utility. As a public utility, they should be obliged to follow procedures that offer due process.

Does that mean they cannot "exclude those who they feel abuse their platform"? That is a tendentious, disingenuous question.

Does that mean they should be obliged to have a legitimate justification for such action, and offer an avenue to challenge it? Yes.

Does it mean the list of justifications should be subject to public review? Yes.

Does it mean that permanent bans for trivial, correctable reasons should not meet the standards of such public review? Yes.


The company which delivers water to my house is a utility. I have no choice but to use them.

The company which delivers electricity to my house is a utility. I have no choice but to use them.

McDonald's isn't a utility. There's lots of other places I can go to get food.

Discord isn't a utility. There are tons of other chat platforms available on the internet.

Gmail isn't a utility. There are lots of other email hosts available.

Are you seriously suggesting Discord is the only place to communicate on the internet to the point it's a utility like water and power?

Are Odd Fellows a utility?

Is Hacker News a utility?




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