Apple CEO Cook pledges $1M to anti-hate groups
Tim Cook disagrees with Trump on Charlottesville, says Apple donating to anti-hate groups
“Hate is a cancer,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told employees as he pledged donations of $1 million each from the Silicon Valley tech giant to two anti-hate organizations, following the deadly violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Wednesday, Cook wrote an email to employees that was obtained by BuzzFeed. In it, he addressed President Donald Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville. Trump had blamed “many sides” for the violence that killed one woman and injured 19 others over the weekend.
“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,” Cook wrote. “Equating the two runs counter to our ideals as Americans.”
The Apple CEO said the Cupertinobased company will also match employee donations “two-for- one” to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, plus other human rights organizations. In addition, Cook said: “In the coming days, iTunes will offer users an easy way to join us in directly supporting the work of the SPLC.”
Apple has also pulled Apple Pay support from some websites that sell white supremacist and Nazi apparel, the company confirmed to this publication Thursday. That move comes as PayPal and crowdfunding sites have begun to turn off the online-funding spigot to hate groups.
The SPLC earlier this week listed the organizers whose PayPal accounts were used to raise money for the Charlottesville rally, prompting PayPal to block some of those accounts from receiving money on the platform.
Other tech companies have taken similar action: Facebook is taking down pages of white supremacists and hate groups. San Francisco-based CloudFlare, which provides internet security services for websites, stripped
a neo-Nazi site of its services. That site, the Daily Stormer, had published an article that slammed Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed Saturday by a car that drove into counter-protesters at the Charlottesville rally. GoDaddy and Google kicked the site off its domain registries after that article. Also, the site’s Twitter account is suspended.
As more tech companies police content, they’re likely to get even more flak for their politics. For example, Mountain View-based Google is still dealing with fallout from its firing of James Damore, the engineer who wrote a 10-page manifesto blasting the company’s diversity push and saying it quashes conservative views.
In his email, Apple’s Cook seemed to try to head off potential criticism along those lines.
“Regardless of your political views, we must all stand together on this one point — that we are all equal,” he wrote. “As a company, through our actions, our products and our voice, we will always work to ensure that everyone is treated equally and with respect.”
Thursday afternoon, Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted a statement condemning the terrorist attacks in Charlottesville and in Spain. More than a dozen people died Thursday and dozens more were injured after a van drove into pedestrians in Barcelona, in what authorities there characterized as a terrorist attack.
“Terrorism is terrorism and it takes many forms,” Pichai tweeted. “The challenge and best response is to speak out, to give hatred no place to fester, and to unite around the values we share.”