Tor Project contributor Steph wrote in a blogpost that while the firm was “appalled”, the project couldn’t pick and choose whose free speech and privacy rights it protects.
Advertisement
“Today, as much as ever, the forces of white supremacy and the forces for equality and justice are locked in fierce battles, not only in Washington but in state houses and city councils around the country”. Airbnb deleted accounts of users it suspected were trying to book rooms in Charlottesville before the event.
The Daily Stormer has been accessible only intermittently the past few days after domain providers GoDaddy Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google Domains said they would not serve the website. Daily Stormer registered its domain with Google Domains, but was promptly expelled by the tech giant.
The vehicle attack that killed Heather Heyer also left close to two dozen other people injured, including some with serious injuries.
WordPress stopped providing web and e-commerce service to Vanguard America, the group to which Fields pledged allegiance.
The SPL has a full list of active hate groups nationwide.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, says the Daily Stormer spreads “anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, primarily through guttural hyperbole and epithet-laden stories about topics like alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime”. But on Monday, the company shut down a hate group server and related accounts, including those associated with Spencer and his website. The online discussion board removed a subreddit for Physical Removal (also one of the sites Facebook banned) because users wrote that the people killed and injured in Charlottesville were “mockeries of life” who “need (ed) to fucking go”. In a follow-up statement, CEO Brian Chesky said “The violence, racism and hatred demonstrated by Neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and white supremacists should have no place in this world”.
“Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion”.
Spotify has said that it would take down white supremacist artists from its app.
The group called on companies that manage internet domain names, including Google and GoDaddy, to “draw a hard line” and not suspend or impair domain names “based on expressive content of websites or services”.
In the blog post, the EFF warned that banning sites of hate groups could backfire in the future. Tech platforms will need to grapple with how to tweak and enforce their policies, and how to actually carry out the messy whack-a-mole business of human and automated moderation. Soon after, Cloudflare, a famously neutral content delivery network (CDN) and internet security provider made a decision to drop protection for the site as well. “But when someone tries to silence others or attacks them based on who they are or what they believe, that hurts us all and is unacceptable”.
Advertisement
SHAHANI: So what’s interesting about what he did – the CEO of Cloudflare – is admitting to something that many tech CEOs don’t want to admit, which is, you know, they’ve got tremendous power over speech and content.
