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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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @05:08AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @05:08AM (#556887)

    Charles Murray's output is simply bigotry pretending to be Science.

    It's like the crap that VLM posted the other day about how a country in west Africa was given an "IQ test" and the population was found to be anencephalic. [google.com]

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @05:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @05:14AM (#556888)

    anencephalic. [google.com]

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Monday August 21 2017, @05:41AM (1 child)

    by Arik (4543) on Monday August 21 2017, @05:41AM (#556892) Journal
    "Charles Murray's output is simply bigotry pretending to be Science."

    That's bullshit, and frankly it's not an argument someone who's read the book could make honestly.

    Is it a flawed work? Of course. Is his thesis flawed? Obviously.

    But simply bigotry? Please. It's a book about facts and theory. Investigating the facts and advancing logical theories to explain them. Facts are subject to verification and refutation, and if the facts are wrong the theory based on them goes with them. Theories can also be invalidated by showing they are logically flawed. This is what you should be doing.

    Not name-calling. Stooping to that tactic signals intellectual bankruptcy.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:45AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @07:45AM (#556915)

      It's a book about facts and theory.

      In your racist dreams. Fake facts and racist theory might make a book, but not a book anyone has any business reading. What is wrong with you? Are you a racist? Or just not too fucking bright, like Runaway1929 in his pants?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @01:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 21 2017, @01:28PM (#557016)

    Charles Murray's output is simply bigotry pretending to be Science

    It isn't really.

    Read some of his works or listen to some full context interviews. His positions have been misused/misrepresented by racists and he has been unfairly held responsible and declared guilty despite even a lack of association with them.

    If he is guilty of something, it would probably be a sort of "reckless endangerment" for unintentionally empowering racists. He probably should've known that the general public would take a small section out of context and run crazy with it.