This is what Internet companies are doing to exile white supremacists

by Dramelin 6:30 PM 0 comments

With the events that happened in Charlottesville, we felt the Daily Stormer went too far, crossed the line: GoDaddy CEO    11:40 AM ET Tue, 15 Aug 2017 | 04:26 Silicon Valley joined a swelling backlash against neo-Nazi groups in the United States on Wednesday as more technology companies removed white supremacists from their services in response to weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Social media networks Twitter and LinkedIn, music service Spotify and security firm CloudFlare were among the companies cutting off services to hate groups or removing material that they said spread hate.
Earlier in the week, Facebook, Alphabet and GoDaddy 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 6 million websites from denial-of-service attacks and hacking, on Wednesday afternoon dropped coverage 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 organize the weekend rally in Charlottesville where a 32-year-old woman was killed and 19 people were injured when a man plowed a car into a crowd protesting the white nationalist gathering.
Daily Stormer has been accessible 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 .
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.
He could not immediately be reached for further comment.