Charlottesville is a tipping point in Silicon Valley's approach to hate speech
Silicon Valley is finally cracking down on white supremacists.
Firms like Twitter, Spotify, chat app Discord, and even famously anti-censorship Cloudflare are taking action against racists and neo-Nazis on their platforms, following this weekend's deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It's a significant change of heart for the tech industry, which has historically positioned itself as pro-"free speech." But the rally*led to a collective reassessment of the responsibilities of tech companies for the content they host and support.
Here's a (non-comprehensive) sample of the action taken by tech businesses over the last week:
GoDaddy, a web-hosting service, booted the notorious neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, off its platform. The site moved to
Google — which promptly ejected it too.
Apple's payment service Apple Pay is cutting off white supremacists, disabling payment support for websites that sell racist and neo-Nazi apparel, BuzzFeed News reported.
Twitter suspended accounts associated with the Daily Stormer.
Facebook, which already has rules in place banning "hate speech" (unlike Twitter), banned accounts (on Facebook and
Instagram) of at least one white nationalist who attended the rally. "It's a disgrace that we still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong — as if this is somehow not obvious," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
Discord, a chat platform that has been popular with the racist "alt-right" movement, cracked down on hate groups and shut down an alt-right server.
Spotify moved to remove "hate bands" from its music streaming service, telling Reuters: "Illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us."
Cloudflare, a service that protects websites from DDoS cyber-attacks, stopped protecting the Daily Stormer — despite its previous commitments to be totally neutral as to the content it guards.
Domain registrar and hosting service
Squarespace has ditched white nationalist customers including Richard Spencer.
Payment service
Paypal has pledged to stop supporting hate websites, while fundraising platform
GoFundMe is pulling fundraisers for the suspect in the Charlottesville vehicle attack.
http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-...esville-2017-8
None of this happens without direct action, direct confrontation.
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