Far Right Fuming After Big Finance Chokes Off Money Flow - 2018-08-21
Far Right Fuming After Big Finance Chokes Off Money Flow August 21, 2018,
Far-right blogger Robert Spencer logged into fundraising site Patreon last week expecting to see how much money he had raised in a new bid to build a studio for his YouTube videos. Instead, Spencer found out his nascent funding campaign was over about as soon as it had started: at Mastercard's request, Patreon was kicking him off the platform.
"Mastercard has a stricter set of rules and regulations than Patreon, and they reserve the right to not offer their services to accounts of their choosing," Patreon wrote in an email to Spencer, a leader in the "counter-jihad" movement. "This is in line with their terms of service, which means it's something we have to comply by."
Mastercard doesn't own Patreon, and both companies were vague about what had prompted Mastercard to flag Patreon payments to Spencer.
