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posted by takyon on Monday August 21 2017, @12:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the internet-hate-cycle dept.

Propublica: Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate

Most tech companies have policies against working with hate websites. Yet a ProPublica survey found that PayPal, Stripe, Newsmax and others help keep more than half of the most-visited extremist sites in business.

Very interesting:

Because of its "extreme hostility toward Muslims," the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site's director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.

But either not their job, or they just didn't know:

Traditionally, tech companies have justified such relationships by contending that it's not their role to censor the Internet or to discourage legitimate political expression. Also, their management wasn't necessarily aware that they were doing business with hate sites because tech services tend to be automated and based on algorithms tied to demographics.

ProPublica goes on to say:

The sites that we identified from the ADL and SPLC lists vehemently denied that they are hate sites.

"It is not hateful, racist or extremist to oppose jihad terror," said Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. He added that the true extremism was displayed by groups that seek to censor the Internet and that by asking questions about the tech platforms on his site, we were "aiding and abetting a quintessentially fascist enterprise."

Business is business. IG Farben said much the same when it had exclusive contracts with the (then current) German government.

See also: After Backing Alt-Right in Charlottesville, A.C.L.U. Wrestles With Its Role

Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has weighed in on the recent controversy surrounding Charlottesville and the effective removal of certain sites from the internet for expressing vile views. This entire incident and our response has an enormous implication on the future of internet freedoms as we know them.

In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is "dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism." Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare's CEO: "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees. Even for free speech advocates, this situation is deeply fraught with emotional, logistical, and legal twists and turns. All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with. Those on the left face calls to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as a hate group. In the Civil Rights Era cases that formed the basis of today's protections of freedom of speech, the NAACP's voice was the one attacked.

Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn't.

It's notable that in GoDaddy and Google's eagerness to swiftly distance themselves from American neo-Nazis, no process was followed. Policies give guidance as to what we might expect, and an opportunity to see justice is done. We should think carefully before throwing them away.

It might seem unlikely now that Internet companies would turn against sites supporting racial justice or other controversial issues. But if there is a single reason why so many individuals and companies are acting together now to unite against neo-Nazis, it is because a future that seemed unlikely a few years ago—where white nationalists and Nazis have significant power and influence in our society—now seems possible. We would be making a mistake if we assumed that these sorts of censorship decisions would never turn against causes we love.

Part of the work for all of us now is to push back against such dangerous decisions with our own voices and actions. Another part of our work must be to seek to shore up the weakest parts of the Internet's infrastructure so it cannot be easily toppled if matters take a turn for the (even) worse. These actions are not in opposition; they are to the same ends.

We can—and we must—do both.

We're at a very fortunate point in history where most of society is still reasonably just, but people forget how rapidly change can come. Rosa Parks chose to not yield her seat in the United States just 62 years ago. Legally enforced racial segregation ended only 53 years ago. Living at a time with overt segregation feels like a time centuries past. However, many living today were still alive when it was the status quo. And things going in the opposite direction just as rapidly is entirely possible as well. Actions and policies should not be guided by the here and now, but by the justness of said policy. In other words policy should be decided based not on who it effects, but on the justness of the said policy. Is it more just to live in a world where people have the right to say things that others may find distasteful, or where people can be effectively removed from society by the [transitory] powers that be? We should answer these questions in a period of just times, not when we desperately need them resolved to restore justness.

As the EFF's statement reminds us, if certain groups are successful organizations such as Black Lives Matter may end up being characterized as a hate group. Radical left organizations such as Antifa have already been declared a domestic terrorism group by at least one state. And this is just on a government level. Nestle, Bayer, BMW, General Electric, Coca Cola (rebranded just for Nazi Germany as Fanta), Standard Oil (now Exxon/Chevron/BP ), IBM, Random House Publishing, and many more are some companies that cooperated and collaborated with the Nazis. To think that the supercompanies of today somehow would never possibly consider going down the wrong path is simply naive. And in a world where just a handful of companies now have a practical monopoly on information access - that's something that I think should give people pause before jumping to silence even the most vile of speech.


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by khallow on Monday August 21 2017, @03:01AM (6 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 21 2017, @03:01AM (#556854) Journal

    It might seem unlikely now that Internet companies would turn against sites supporting racial justice or other controversial issues. But if there is a single reason why so many individuals and companies are acting together now to unite against neo-Nazis, it is because a future that seemed unlikely a few years ago—where white nationalists and Nazis have significant power and influence in our society—now seems possible. We would be making a mistake if we assumed that these sorts of censorship decisions would never turn against causes we love.

    I'd care, if the people who have this concern knew what a Nazi was. Instead, it's just a delusional waste of time. Show there's an actual problem first, then call me.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 21 2017, @03:39AM (5 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 21 2017, @03:39AM (#556867)

    Show there's an actual problem first, then call me.

    How many people need to be killed before it's an "actual problem" by your standards? It's obviously more than 1.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @04:36AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @04:36AM (#556882)

      You should watch what you say. You just used the exact same argument that people who want to 'ban' Islam in the US use. Horse shoe theory [wikipedia.org] indeed! The problem is not one-off extremism. It's when violence and intimidation begins to become a standard part of a group's platform. People are free to espouse the most detestable views. The time for concern is when those views begin to include violence or intimidation as a part of the group's normal platform. When groups organize specifically for the purpose of physical confrontations or intimidation then yeah - I'd be the first to side with you. There's a difference between expression and violent mobs.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 21 2017, @09:35AM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 21 2017, @09:35AM (#556942) Journal

      How many people need to be killed before it's an "actual problem" by your standards?

      Quite a few actually. Let us keep in mind that the actual Nazis were involved in street riots that killed plenty of people. For example, 18 people died in a street riot [wikipedia.org] that involved the Nazis and Communists in 1932 which triggered the coup [wikipedia.org] that took down the Free State of Prussia and escalated from there.

      If you want this to stay a non-problem then tend to the economics and politics of the US not its speech. It's troublesome how so many people are obsessed over the trappings of a wealthy country, like publicly funded entitlements, while ignoring what it takes to create and maintain said wealthy country (lots of people get to work and sacrifice).

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 21 2017, @11:34AM (1 child)

        by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 21 2017, @11:34AM (#556975)

        (lots of people get to work and sacrifice)

        Except not really. When you look at when America was truly a great nation, the late 1950's, there wasn't a huge amount of "sacrifice" involved in taking most of the available jobs. The work culture really tended towards 40-hour work weeks with generous pay (often thanks to government funding and/or a union contract), which brought enough in that substantial numbers of families could afford to have an adult at home as well as quite a lot of discretionary spending and free time. Between OSHA and union protections, work was relatively safe to do.

        That plus the FHA establishing affordable home mortgages made it a pretty good time to be alive if you were white (non-white people faced institutionalized discrimination, particularly in housing). It also enabled the US to have unprecedented levels of improvement to science, education, industry, infrastructure, and quality of life.

        And the idea that we couldn't do that again is also false, since other countries are doing that and get similar or better results than the US does.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @03:11PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @03:11PM (#557059)

          You're not considering arguably the most important issue in modern society today.

          That is the ratio of qualified workers to the number of desirable jobs. It has gotten bad. This is the reason you'll see "entry level" positions requiring years of experience and knowledge of industry specific technologies. Whereas in the 50s entry level meant 'high school degree preferred.' Yes the jobs have gotten more technical, but the reason for the extensive experience requirements for "entry level" positions is not because people without such experience could not be trained to do such work, but because there are people who have such experience that would be willing to work for entry level wages. And if there aren't - then no problem, simply get an H1B to fill the position, and publicly bemoan the "STEM shortage" in the US.

          I'd agree with you that employers, as a whole, have gotten substantially more sociopathic in the interim but I think that's also in related to this. It's increasingly profitable to intentionally churn through workers as they're replaced by automated systems, foreign workers willing to work for cheaper, or even new overqualified domestic employees willing to start for "entry level" wages to "get their foot in the door." That greatly discourages forming any sort of relationship or bond with your employees. In times when workers were valuable somebody you hire is somebody you might expect to see 20 years from now. Now a days people working for 20 years (and increasingly often we can really change that into even just 4 or 5 years) at the same job is just not something that really happens. Think about how you treat the family dog as opposed to how farmers treat their pigs and beef cows. A very different relationship forms depending on the expected outcome, even if the people involved don't change.

          And in the 50s there was, as you mention, institutional discrimination. Women were mostly entirely removed from the workforce, overt racism was very much a real thing, and outsourcing didn't exist. You started with a worker base (before considering things like education and so on) of a fraction of the population size relative to today. That leads to another metric - that metric being the ratio of all individuals needed to produce the goods and services to sustain the remainder of the population, but I expect this post is already getting a bit long as is.