It’s bad form for online marketplaces to ban items for ideological reasons. Not everyone buying a Confederate battle flag has the same purpose in mind — it may be used in a play or reenactment, for example. An antique item which bears a Confederate battle flag has historical value and should be preserved, and marketplaces like eBay connect sellers to collectors who will keep these items intact. As @crenquis points out with the example of the General Lee matchbox car, these regulations are also likely to have unintended consequences.
More basically, do we really want online marketplaces inserting themselves into political controversies this way? If it’s okay to block this particular symbol, who else has an ax to grind? Suppose, for example, the anti-flag burning lobby wants to ban merchandise that “defiles” the American flag (i.e., flag-pattern panties, or the Ad Busters corporate American flag). If they do it in one case, what is their “excuse” for not doing it in another?
I’m not a defender of the Confederate battle flag, but I am an online seller and I would prefer that online marketplaces remained as laissez-faire as possible.
The fact that the battle flag of a pro-slavery insurgency was presented (or accepted) with a straight face as ‘just a symbol of southern pride’ arguably is racist baggage.
Building cultural symbols around periods in history where you lost probably isn’t healthy in general; but the confederacy doesn’t even have the virtue of being a noble lost cause.
What I wouldn’t give for a serious knee jerk reaction that actually made guns even slightly more difficult to buy or obtain than birth control. Can’t we have that knee jerk reaction just once?
Here in Austria, we’ve got a law that bans all kinds of Nazi merchandise.
So we insist on e-bay and its local equivalents not selling Nazi merchandise in Austria.
Americans have told me that it’s a bad law because it’s fundamentally incompatible with free speech, but at least it is a democratically legitimized law. It is also subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.
Amazon and eBay are just big, dominant companies. Guided by the current mood of the mob, unaccountable and unelected powerful people in the company headquarters decide which products should be banned and which shouldn’t.
If you want to ban confederate flags, then do so, by democratic means. If you don’t think that a democratically elected government should have the right to ban the sale of racist symbols, then powerful companies shouldn’t have the right, either.
These are democratic means, in the sense that the companies are run by private citizens perfectly capable of making up their own minds. And it’s quite possible that instead of being cowed by “the mob,” they’ve made up their minds to do the right thing, despite a loss of sales (since Confederate flag purchases have spiked these days).
Wow. That is the complete opposite of what your average American believes. In fact, I’m actually having a hard time seeing your point of view because our guarantees of freedom of speech are so deeply ingrained in me.
You’re effectively saying that big companies should be forced to sell racist stuff their own management finds offensive as long as there is a market for those products. That’s just nonsense.
If an American wants to make, buy or sell a Confederate flag or a Nazi armband or a “no fat chicks” T-shirt or a sign that says “God Hates Fags” they are free to do so. That doesn’t mean other retailers should have to cater to them.
Indeed, I’ve remarked on this cultural difference before.
But it’s not the guarantee of freedom itself that is ingrained, it is also a particular idea of who it should be protected from. The American idea is to protect freedom of expression from interference by the state, and from nothing else. On the other hand, my boss in Austria has far less opportunities to limit my freedom of speech than the average American boss has.
Depends on what you mean by “forced”. I was not suggesting a law.
But you could say I’m in favour of customers “forcing” amazon to carry all products without judging in the same way that they are now “forcing” Amazon to ban confederate flags.
Even in America, there are laws that say that “Common Carriers” have to transport everyone who pays the fare. Making eBay something like a common carrier for auctions would make sense, too. But even without a law, that is what they should view themselves as.
The only way the market dominance of companies like Amazon, eBay, Mastercard, Visa, etc… is compatible with a free society is when they don’t play politics. Constitutional guarantees about freedom aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on if services that used to be public are now private. (“the place where you go to find shops” used to be “downtown”, but now it’s Amazon; “the way you pay for stuff” used to be paper money, but now it’s “Mastercard or Visa”).
What if, one day, there was an international non-profit group of journalists who dared to publish documents that the US government didn’t want published, and what if, for some reason, MasterCard and Visa both decided that the US government was right? Well they’d be able to effectively cut off the flow of donations for that non-profit group of journalists. So glad that that will never happen.
Because some retailers are becoming so dominant that such a decision by management is indistinguishable from state censorship.
Might be interesting to note that eBay already specifically bans Nazi memorabilia. I guess they’ll just put the Confederate stuff under a similar heading.
We recognize the historical significance of World War II and that there are many militaria collectors around the world. We allow some related historical items, but ban others, particularly those that amount to Nazi propaganda, or that are disrespectful to victims.
