Cutting off white supremacists: Apple, Cloudflare join the trend
Apple and Cloudflare have joined the parade of companies cutting off services to white nationalists after an anti-racist counter-protester was killed and others were injured in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend.
In statements circulated among employees and published online, the companies condemned hate groups and distanced themselves from President Donald Trump’s assertions that some “very fine people” were among the torchcarrying white supremacists in Charlottesville and that “both sides” were to blame for the violence.
The moves come as corporations scramble to erase any perception that they condone white supremacists, at least partly motivated by fear of tarnishing their brands.
“We must not witness or permit such hate and bigotry in our country, and we must be unequivocal about it,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a Wednesday memo to employees that was posted on BuzzFeed. “This is not about the left or the right, conservative or liberal. It is about human decency and morality. I disagree with the president and others who believe that there is a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis, and those who oppose them by standing up for human rights.”
The company also disabled Apple Pay support to several websites selling apparel with white nationalist and Nazi themes.
Cloudflare — a web security provider whose services shield sites from cyberattacks — has prided itself on its neutrality and unwavering commitment to free speech, standing
firm in 2013 when it was accused of supporting terrorism because it provided services to a Che chen news site.
But events of the past week proved too much for the tech firm, and it terminated the account of neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. (It was the third blow for the site: GoDaddy and then Google canceled the Daily Stormer’s domain earlier in the week after the site mocked Heather Heyer, the counter-protester who was killed in Charlottesville.) Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said Cloudflare’s terms of service gave it the right to terminate users at its sole discretion, and “I’d had enough.”
He wrote in a blog post that the tipping point was when the Daily Stormer “made the claim that we (Cloudflare) were secretly supporters of their ideology. … We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support.”
Prince’s reasoning was personal — he said in an email to employees that the decision was his alone — but in recent days, other tech companies have booted white supremacists from their services, citing violations of their terms of use policies.