[mikeash]

"Are there limits to what you would host?"

"Instead of imposing our own morality on the platform, we defer to the law. All products must be legal in the jurisdiction of the business."

Compare that to the terms of service:

"We may, but have no obligation to, remove Store Content and Accounts containing content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Service."

If their entire policy is to defer to the law, why do they reserve the right to remove content for all these other reasons? Maybe they've changed their mind and haven't gotten around to codifying the new policy?

I took a look around their store to see if the objection was purely based on their views, or if there were offensive products. I came across a t-shirt which puts "E Pluribus Unum" inside an eagle insignia that is clearly the Nazi parteiadler minus the swastika part. I think it would be reasonable to say that this is offensive and possibly threatening, although no doubt perfectly legal in most places.

(This is not my first experience with surprise parteiadlers. I once got a free pair of sunglasses with a contact lens exam which turned out to be from BOY London, whose logo is the parteiadler minus the swastika. I exchanged them and suggested to that store that they might want to stop carrying merchandise with Nazi symbols on them. They were rather shocked to discover it. Until then, I didn't know that I had to check for Nazi symbols on stuff!)

Beyond that, I dislike this idea that picking and choosing with whom you do business is "censorship." This isn't speech, it's commerce. You're helping to fund these guys. Breitbart absolutely has the right to free speech, but they have no right to sell their wares through whatever platform they choose. If Shopify chose not to send money to these crypto-Nazis, it would not be an act of censorship. Their words would still be available to anyone who chooses to obtain them, Shopify just wouldn't be helping anymore.

[yellowapple]

The extra legalese is usually a CYA. They can reserve the right to remove "offensive" content without necessarily exercising that right.

[mikeash]

Well sure. But if your policy really is "anything that's legal" then there's no need to CYA. The only reason you'd have that clause in the first place is if you thought you might want to remove legal but offensive content.

Imagine if someone made a big deal about being inclusive of all races, but their TOS said, "We reserve the right to kick out black people." Nothing says they have to exercise that right....

[yellowapple]

The CYA is there in case the policy changes for some reason.

It's kind of like those "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" signs you see in mom and pop shops. Just because they reserve the right doesn't mean they're going to exercise it.

[mikeash]

There's a difference between a blanket CYA like that which is totally general, and a version that calls out specific reasons like this.

Would you consider a "We reserve the right to refuse service to black people" clause to be a benign CYA, or would you consider that maybe this clause is in conflict with a supposed policy of no racial discrimination?

[yellowapple]

In that particular case, I reckon such a clause would run afoul of various regulations prohibiting discrimination against a protected class (specifically, a racial/ethnic minority). Thus, there's no "right to refuse service to black people" to reserve.

That aside, my point is that this is a very common clause for online businesses, and the existence of such a clause - again - does not mean it has to be enforced. Plenty of companies add all sorts of things to their terms of service / privacy policies / EULAs / etc. to cover all sorts of contingencies, and this seems very ordinary and mundane in that context.