Silicon Valley spent years preaching a hands-off approach to even the most extreme speech in the interest of connecting the entire world.
After Charlottesville,medical sex worker video that's changing quickly.
Facebook, Google, Spotify, Uber, Squarespace, and a variety of other tech companies are taking action to curb the use of their platforms and services by far-right organizations. The effort, though apparently uncoordinated, is among the most aggressive campaigns yet to push a particular group off the internet's mainstream spaces.
The moves come in the immediate aftermath of a weekend of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the "Unite The Right" rally resulted in three deaths and dozens of injuries. The Facebook Event page for the rally, which drew a mix of white nationalists, self-identified Nazis, and the alt-right, was live for more than a month before Facebook removed it, Business Insiderreported. It was only shut down one day prior to the rally.
Now, a violent act affiliated with the alt-right is serving as a turning point, and more tech companies are taking public and private actions—some unprecedented or at least unusual—against what they and their communities are flagging. Facebook and Reddit are actively shutting down several hate groups, CNETreported. Even Cloudflare, a cloud security company with a history of taking a hardline stance against limiting the use of its services, has reportedly changed its position.
Brittan Heller, director of technology and society at Anti-Defamation League, said the actions show a shift how these companies make decisions.
"Previously tech companies felt like their job was to work behind the scenes and to focus on the business of business. What I think has changed since Charlottesville is the fact that companies are free to create online communities that reflect the type of communities they want to see in real life," he said
"Companies are now realizing that now is a time of moral leadership," Heller said, whose organization published its first report on cyberhate in 1985.
The Daily Stormer, a website launched in 2013 by neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, has been at the center of many of these decisions. The site's affiliation with the alt-right and hate speech is nothing new. Anglin is being sued for launching a “harassment campaign that has relentlessly terrorized a Jewish woman and her family with anti-Semitic threats and messages," The Daily Beast reported in July.
Recently The Daily Stormergained mainstream attention for their bigotry in Charlottesville. The group had helped to coordinate the rally. Afterwards, content on their website praised the man who murdered anti-racist protester Heather Heyes After her death, other posts personally attacked Heyes.
After Charlottesville, the website's once-tolerated hate is now crossing the line, at least in the eyes of the tech companies that worked with it.
"Since tech companies are private entities by law they have the right to take action on their terms of service. They can make choices based on the demands of their customers and the needs of the market. This was the point that it wasn’t just freedom of expression, it was incitement to violence," Heller said.
On Sunday, GoDaddy told The Daily Stormerthat it would stop hosting its hate-filled message boards. The company later went to Google, who banned them from using the service. Google also removed the company's YouTube page. Email provider Zoho dropped them as a client.
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Facebook also has been more active, deleting links to The Daily Stormerarticle that personally attacked Heather Heyer, an anti-racist protester who was murdered after a driver struck her with his car. The article can only be shared if it includes a caption condemning the post.
"Any shares of TheDaily Stormerarticle that don’t include a caption will be deleted, Facebook said," according to The Verge.
And yet, GoDaddy, the first tech company to make a major public move against The Daily Stormer, had previously defended the website.
When asked by The Daily Beastin July why GoDaddy hosts The Daily Stormerand other alt-right websites, the company cited the First Amendment and noted they have "more than 17 million customers" so they cannot monitor every lawsuit.
Twitter's made similar arguments in the past for its reason to allow President Donald Trump to use the platform regarding free speech and for its scale and continuous game of whack a mole when it comes to addressing abuse reports.
When it comes to The Daily Stormerand other alt-right leaders on Twitter, the company does not comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reason, a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable.
But Twitter's community standards do include a "Hateful conduct policy," which specifically states, "You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease."
A Twitter account claiming to be The Daily Stormerwas suspended this week.
"Something that violates community terms can float under the radar for years, whether it’s a closed community or there’s just not outside or public scrutiny on what the group is doing," said Emma Llanso, director of the Free Expression Project for the Center for Democracy & Technology.
"It's not going to be a perfectly applied set of terms because that’s essentially impossible for websites and online services to do given the sheer volume of content," Llanso continued.
Not all action took place in the aftermath. Airbnb had been made aware of the potential threat earlier in the month. The home-sharing platform had learned attendees of the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia had registered to use its services via the community and proceeded to ban them.
"When we see people pursuing behavior on the platform that would be antithetical to the Airbnb Community Commitment, we take appropriate action. In this case, last week, we removed these people from Airbnb," CEO Brian Chesky said in a statement.
Uber banned white supremacist James Allsup from its ride-hailing platform over the weekend after he made racist remarks while using service. The company also sent out an email to drivers in Charlottesville, noting they can contact Uber support and that they have the "right to feel safe and respected when you use our platform," BuzzFeedreported.
The pushback didn't happen as quick for some tech companies. Cloudflare still worked withThe Daily Stormer until Wednesday.
According to an earlier statement from Cloudflare, they do not host anything and therefore do not have as much of a stake in the events, it seems.
"Cloudflare terminating any user would not remove their content from the Internet, it would simply make a site slower and more vulnerable to attack," a statement from the company reads, according to Quartz.
But that type of laissez-faire attitude sparked outrage.
On Wednesday, Matt Sheffield of Salontweeted an image of Anglin sharing an email of his Cloudflare subscription being terminated.
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Cloudflare issued a blog post Wednesday titled "Why We Terminated Daily Stormer," where CEO Matthew Prince explained their decision to hold back before and what had changed.
"Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology," Prince wrote in the blog.
Also on Wednesday, Spotify pulled "hate music" from its streaming platform, after Digital Music Newspublished a list of 27 bands it described as "white power music."
PayPal and Apple Pay both pulled its services from sites selling white supremacy and Nazi products.
In a recent blog post, PayPal SVP of corporate affairs and communication Franz Paasche, wrote about the company's acceptable use policy. "Regardless of the individual or organization in question, we work to ensure that our services are not used to accept payments or donations for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance," he wrote. He said this includes "organizations that advocate racist views, such as the KKK, white supremacist groups or Nazi groups."
Apple Pay similarly will block hate sites. Users “may not incorporate Apple Pay into a website that that promotes hate, violence, or intolerance based on race, age, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation,” according to its guidelines. BuzzFeedreported that several websites that sold products with Nazi logos and the phrase "White Pride" were kicked off Apple Pay.
For several networks, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter, their terms of service against hate speech and violence firmed up in 2015, when the public and several lawmakers pushed them on addressing terrorism. They also faced scrutiny in Europe, where hosting hate speech violates laws.
Now, the companies face a reality in which it's "important to be able to take proactive steps under their own terms instead of having to be responsive," said Llanso of the Center for Democracy & Technology.
The "Unite The Right" rally has only made it increasingly difficult for platforms to stay silent as the actions are broadcasted on social media and on television and not just behind closed doors or in pockets of the United States.
This post was updated with a statement from Cloudflare and information about Apple Pay, PayPal, and Uber.
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