Saturday, May 05, 2018
"Alt-Right" domain banned by Godaddy as tech companies become more wary of "hate" content (not necessarily because of FOSTA)
Tech companies, recall, have started pulling a few
extremist sites or accounts (especially from the alt-Right) off the
Internet. Remember Daily Stormer was
taken down by Cloudflare and others in August.
Now Buzzfeed and the Verge and others reported May 4 that GoDaddy had
pulled “Alt-Right” from domain registration and apparently from actual hosting.
Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute remains
online. There is another forum site
called StormFront which is still online (although it has had issues, as the Verge explains in an earlier detailed article.)
Spencer has had trouble getting representation and
keeping donation nodes up, also, according to Buzzfeed.
Last December, Twitter said it would “Purge” members
that it found associated with certain extremist organizations, even if not
misbehaving on Twitter. Some alt-right accounts
were purged.
Tech companies so far say they are acting only when a
site advocates or tries to organize actual violence.
But these incidents show that even web hosting
companies are capable of monitoring some content for grossly illegal or objectionable
material, such as child pornography, drug trafficking (online pharmacies), terrorist
recruiting and apparently can do some watching for sex-trafficking in view of
the recent passage of FOSRA/SESTA. All
of these companies outline impressible content in their AUP’s. It's important to remember that in the U.S. companies are not legally required to shut down hate speech (they are in the EU and UK) and for now are still protected by Section 230, although the companies are probably bracing themselves for that to change and believe they have to adhere to international norms of morality.
I am not defending the alt-right. But it is troubling to try to say who can
organize and who can’t.
Furthermore, the meaning of “hate speech” often is in
the eye of the beholder. For some people,
meta-speech about an oppressed group from someone not belonging to the group is
hate speech. The appropriateness of
speech could depend on the identity and circumstances of the speaker (my own
substitute teaching incident, described here July 27, 2007). We could be headed toward a social code
regarding speech more like China’s (with its social credit score idea).
The banning of one of Specer’s sites was reported May
5 on CNN by the special “The Dark Side of the Internet’ which I will review soon
on the TV blog.
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