More tech companies block white supremacists
SAN FRANCISCO: Silicon Valley joined a swelling backlash against neo-Nazi groups in the United States as more technology companies removed white supremacists from their services in response to weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Social media networks Twitter Inc and LinkedIn, music service Spotify Ltd and security firm Cloudflare Inc were among the companies cutting off services to hate groups or removing material that they said spread hate.
Earlier in the week, Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc and GoDaddy Inc also took steps to block hate groups.
The wave of Internet crackdowns against white nationalists and neo-Nazis reflected a rapidly changing mindset among Silicon Valley firms on how far they are willing to go to police hate speech.
Tech companies have taken down violent propaganda from Islamic State and other militant groups, in part in response to government pressure.
But most Internet companies have traditionally tried to steer clear of making judgments about content except in cases of illegal activity.
Cloudflare, which protects some six million websites from denial-of-service attacks and hacking, on Wednesday afternoon dropped cov- erage of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.
“I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,” Cloudflare founder and chief executive Matthew Prince said in an email to employees.
Cloudflare is well-known for defending even the most distasteful websites, and services like it are essential to the functioning of websites.
Daily Stormer helped organise the weekend rally in Charlottesville where a 32-year-old woman was killed and 19 people were injured when a man ploughed a car into a crowd protesting the gathering.
Daily Stormer has been accessi- ble only intermittently the past few days after domain providers GoDaddy and Google Domains, a unit of Alphabet, said they would not serve the website.
By Wednesday, Daily Stormer had moved to a Russia-based Internet domain, with an address ending in .ru. Later in the day, though, the site was no longer accessible at that address.
Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin said on a social network used by many of his supporters, Gab, that his site would be back soon.
“The Cloudflare betrayal adds another layer of super complexity. But we got this,” he said.
Twitter on Wednesday suspended accounts linked to Daily Stormer.
The company said it would not discuss individual accounts, but at least three affiliated with the Daily Stormer led to pages saying “account suspended”.
The social network prohibits violent threats, harassment and hateful conduct and “will take action on accounts violating those policies”, the company said in a statement.
Larger rival Facebook Inc, which unlike Twitter explicitly prohibits hate speech, has taken down several pages from Facebook and Instagram in recent days that it said were associated with hate speech or hate organisations. — Reuters