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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.
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: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 21 2017, @03:37AM (10 children)
Tech companies are under exactly zero legal obligation to provide services for organizations they don't like for whatever reason. They also can and do censor all kinds of sites for all kinds of reasons.
Your free speech rights mean that (a) you can say / write things, and (b) the government can't send you to jail for it. It does not mean that anyone else has to help you spread whatever you said / wrote, nor does it guarantee that nobody will choose to respond to what you said / wrote in ways you don't like (e.g. firing you from your job).
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, @04:14AM (1 child)
This is like discussing slavery and then responding, "Once again it's very clear under law that black people are property. Property cannot have rights. Stealing property is theft. This is all extremely simple and has been understood for thousands of years and is very clearly written in our law."
The reason that our founding fathers focused on government is because in times past they were the primary body of influence on the people. Our founding fathers would have had complete disbelief at the notion that in a very short period of time the largest grouping of people under one body would not be a nation under a government, but billions of people digitally connected under a private company. For that matter private companies are now starting to rival nations even in terms of GDP. Wal-Mart, alone, is the 23rd largest economy in the world and that's just comparing their revenue to GDP - GDP is artificially multiplied, revenue is not. I really think the only imaginable reason people support private companies being able to remove individuals from discussion in society is because they currently agree with who's being removed. It's much like slavery. There is no doubt that most people understood, internally, that slavery was wrong - but since they weren't the slaves, cognitive dissonance kicked in and suddenly it's okay. As stated above:
I have 0 love for the people being removed from society, but I have the ability to separate my schadenfreude from my views of morality and ethics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @04:18AM
I think the EFF might have put it even more eloquently:
(Score: 3, Touché) by Arik on Monday August 21 2017, @05:24AM (5 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 21 2017, @08:35AM (4 children)
If you ever used subsidized medicine (or any "special treatment from the government"), does it mean you forever are bound to the same contract towards the other fellow citizens as the government?
Is the "you took public money, you behave how I tell you" a contract that bounds you, a private entity, forever and under any/all circumstances?
Maybe they acted within the bounds of a contract with the government, but I really really doubt they acted as agents of the government.
I'm happy to be proved wrong, though: would you be so kind to provide a citation to your claim?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday August 21 2017, @10:03AM (3 children)
Private should be kept private and public should be kept public. There's no excuse to do otherwise.
But we've been doing otherwise, in spades, for a good century now.
It's ludicrous to look at the actions of entities that could not take those actions without their cozy relationship with the state, that would not even exist without it, as the actions of purely private entities. They are government agents and they should be held to the same standard. If they find this cumbersome, they should seek to disentangle themselves and create a clear separation.
"Maybe they acted within the bounds of a contract with the government, but I really really doubt they acted as agents of the government."
You're not even making sense. If they are acting within the bounds of a contract with the government, on behalf of the government, that makes them government agents. If they're government agents, then the bill of rights applies to them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 21 2017, @11:36AM (2 children)
Are we still speaking about GoDaddy, Google and CloudFlare here?
Because your description apply better to defence contractors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday August 21 2017, @12:06PM (1 child)
They have spooks patched into their main lines bro. Have for years. When the US Govt says jump they say "how high?" When they're told 'add this binary to every image and autoexec it' they say 'yes sir.' They're just as much government agents as any PFC or traffic officer under direct orders.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 21 2017, @12:38PM
It would be so if you can demonstrate their willing participation (rather than, perhaps, reluctant obeisance of the law)
Otherwise, it is no different from conducted businesses in, say, China or Germany.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @09:01AM (1 child)
Not true. What do you think would happen if they closed my account because I was black? What do you think would happen if they closed my account because I was muslim? There'd be lawyers lining up to represent me.
But if I put up a website that said "why are blacks and muslims in a protected class and I'm not?" then I would be labeled a bigot and my site WOULD be taken down.
When you have a few protected classes, pretty soon everyone wants to be in one. Not being in one becomes a class of its own.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @10:36AM
> Not being in one becomes a class of its own.
Pretty much the "Pariah" class.