That's the cost of starting a business impersonating a common carrier.

I very much agree with your common carrier comment, but Facebook needs to be pragmatic about it's mission.

Watch me make a grand jury disappear.

Its A) codified into a business contract, not the actions of a private individual B) the use of private metadata and C) the stipulation that BBC is the enforcement mechanism that is problematic here.

Otherwise the BBC would quickly find that when they are late paying the contractors who work on their website their credit cards mysteriously get charged for the services rendered.

The court treats the actions of individuals on a case by case basis. Your analogy breaks down when codified into a business contract. By stipulating a course of action that may cause real financial harm. Even if they were to stipulate fines or other remedies in response to perceived financial harm on their part the enforcement of such penalties is not their responsibility. They have taken enforcement powers away from the government.

Think of it like this: If I'm a web developer and I haven't received payment for my services I can withhold those services or even retain control of the product I am providing or use the courts to enforce the contract, but if I used the client's credit card info to enforce fines and pay myself I have broken the law regardless of whether I put it in the contract.

Funny, I've never heard of an Officer of the BBC. I've heard of an Officer of the law and an Officer of the court. They're generally responsible for enforcing penalties, fines, jail sentences, probation, sex offender lists, etc.

If you'd like to add, "tattling to your employer" to that list I suggest you talk to parliament. They get awfully upset when you try to "do things for them" via cellophane business contracts.

Certainly BBC has officers. Some of them even have "Officer" in their job titles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Executive_Committee

In making this argument to personal friends I have heard several times, "Well what about tow trucks? They have the right to enforce contracts on private property and they aren't officers of the law!?"

The answer is that there are existing federal statutes in place to allow this. They are controversial and often challenged. Tow truck drivers operate in a grey area of the law and are frequently found to be in violation of the law. I would hope that the BBC values their operating license more than my local tow company.

The courts and laws are established to determine appropriate action in such a case.

Proving real damage to the BBC due to what they perceive to be "hate speech" is difficult.

The BBC has put in their terms that they reserve the right to cause real financial harm to those they perceive to be writing "hate speech".

I can put in my contract that I reserve the right to murder you, and if you sign it I'm still going to jail. Such is the case here. The BBC just made themselves look like idiots for no enforceable reason.

If telling your ISP about something you sent causes you "real financial harm", perhaps you shouldn't have sent it. Perhaps you are responsible for the "real financial harm" to yourself.

The law is designed to cover cases you might not immediately think of. Protecting men/women from "legal" harassing communication in the work place, protecting homosexual couples from discrimination, etc. eliminating such protections to stick it to nazis is, to put it mildly, naive

Honest question here... can you plead the 5th amendment to avoid civil liability? I don't know if revealing company trade secrets is an actual crime (even if you work for NASA) but working for almost any company this would be breach of contract and grounds for termination...

This is akin to my bank freezing my accounts because I gave them a bad review online.

I would love to see them try to enforce this. *If a brick and mortar bank tried this there would be a run on their accounts so fast it would make Usain Bolt blush.

As a seller, you don't have a choice. You can:

* Accept PayPal, and play ball with their policies.

* Disparage them, and get your account seized.

* Not accept PayPal, and lose out on millions of customers.

Please don't say BitCoin is an alternative. Unless you're selling heroin, or your entire customer base consists of crypto-anarcho-libertarians, it's not.

* Use alternative payment systems.

Equivalent to #3. There are a lot of people who only use PayPal online. In the HN space? Probably not that many. If you're selling shirts or random widgets online? The GP is not exaggerating by saying that literally millions of people will get to payment, see they have to type in a CC number and that PP is not an option, and they will leave.

for the most part if you use EBAY you really don't have much of a choice and as a buyer ebay pushes paypal

You're forgetting the network effects, my friend. They can get away with this because they already have people locked in.

What little competition they have is worse. Credit cards are probably on the path to the root of 'evil' for this form of (seller and) consumer abuse.

This is what legislation is for. There's always a bigger fish.

There are some parallels with rules of brick and mortar banks for credit card acquiring; at least in certain markets stating that you'd give a discount for paying cash instead of card or discouraging card payments in other ways would put you on a track to get blacklisted from accepting any credit cards at all.