How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature
How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their
True Nature
By JOHN HERRMAN AUG. 21, 2017
White supremacist marchers had not yet lit their torches
when the deletions began. The ‘‘Unite the Right’’ Facebook page, which had been
used to organize the rally in Charlottesville, was removed the day before the
event was scheduled, forcing planners to disperse to other platforms to
organize. And then, in the hours and days after a participant drove his car into
a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring at
least 19 others, internet companies undertook a collective purge.
Facebook banned a range of pages with names like ‘‘Right
Wing Death Squad’’ and ‘‘White Nationalists United.’’ Reddit banned, among
others, a hard-right community called ‘‘Physical Removal,’’ an organizer of
which had called the weekend’s killing ‘‘a morally justified action.’’ Twitter
suspended an unknown number of users, including popular accounts associated
with 4chan’s openly fascistic Politically Incorrect message board, or /pol/.
Discord, a chat app for gamers that doubled as an organizing tool for the
event, and where a prominent white supremacist had called for disrupting
Heyer’s funeral, rushed to do cleanup.
The clampdown extended beyond the walled gardens of
social platforms to a wide array of online services. The Daily Stormer, a
neo-Nazi site that promoted the march and celebrated its fatal outcome, was
banned by the domain registrar and hosting service GoDaddy, then hours later by
Google’s hosting service, then lost access to SendGrid, which it had used to
deliver its newsletter; PayPal cut off the white nationalist Richard Spencer’s
organization, which later lost access to its web host, Squarespace; Airbnb
removed the accounts of a number of Charlottesville attendees before the event,
and released a statement saying that ‘‘violence, racism and hatred demonstrated
by neo-Nazis, the alt-right and white supremacists should have no place in
this world’’; by Wednesday, Spotify was even expunging ‘‘white supremacist’’
music from its library.
The platforms’ sudden action in response to an outpouring
of public grief and rage resembles, at first glance, a moral awakening and
suggests a mounting sense of responsibility to the body politic. You could be
forgiven for seeing this as a turning point for these sites, away from a
hands-off approach to the communities they host and toward something with more
oversight and regulation. An inside-out version of this analysis has been
embraced by right-wing users, who have wasted no time declaring these bans a
violation of their free speech. But this is an incomplete accounting of what
happened and one that serves two parties and two parties alone: the companies
themselves and the people they’ve just banned.
The recent rise of all-encompassing internet platforms
promised something unprecedented and invigorating: venues that unite all manner
of actors — politicians, media, lobbyists, citizens, experts, corporations —
under one roof. These companies promised something that no previous vision of
the public sphere could offer: real, billion-strong mass participation; a means
for affinity groups to find one another and mobilize, gain visibility and
influence. This felt and functioned like freedom, but it was always a
commercial simulation. This contradiction is foundational to what these
internet companies are. Nowhere was this tension more evident than in the case
of Cloudflare, a web-infrastructure company. Under sustained pressure to drop
The Daily Stormer as a client, the company’s chief executive, Matthew Prince,
eventually assented. It was an arbitrary decision, and one that was out of step
with the company’s stated policies. This troubled Prince. ‘‘I woke up in a bad
mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet,’’ he wrote in an
email to his staff. ‘‘No one should have that power.’’
Social platforms tend to refer to their customers in
euphemistic, almost democratic terms: as ‘‘users’’ or ‘‘members of a
community.’’ Their leaders are prone to statesmanlike posturing, and some, like
Mark Zuckerberg, even seem to have statesmanlike ambitions. Content moderation
and behavioral guidelines are likewise rendered in the terms of legal
governance, as are their systems for dispute and recourse (as in the ubiquitous
post-ban ‘‘appeal’’). Questions about how platforms like Twitter and Reddit
deal with disruptive users and offensive content tend to be met with defensive
language invoking free speech.
In the process of building private communities, these
companies had put on the costumes of liberal democracies. They borrowed the
language of rights to legitimize arbitrary rules, creating what the technology
lawyer Kendra Albert calls ‘‘legal talismans.’’
This was first and foremost operationally convenient or
even necessary: What better way to avoid liability and responsibility for how
customers use your product? It was also good marketing. It’s easier to entrust
increasingly large portions of your private and public life to an advertising
and data-mining firm if you’re led to believe it’s something more. But as major
internet platforms have grown to compose a greater share of the public sphere,
playing host to consequential political organization — not to mention media —
their internal contradictions have become harder to ignore. Far before
Charlottesville, they had already become acute.
In a bracing Vice documentary about the rally, a man
identified as a writer for The Daily Stormer told the reporter Elle Reeve, ‘‘As
you can see, we’re stepping off the internet in a big way.’’ He saw the turnout
as confirmation that what he’d been a part of online was real. ‘‘We have been
spreading our memes, we’ve been organizing on the internet, and so now they’re
coming out,’’ he said, before digressing into a rant about ‘‘anti-white,
anti-American filth.’’ This sentiment was echoed in active and longstanding
far-right communities on Reddit and 4chan and adjacent communities on Facebook
and Twitter.
It is worth noting that the platforms most flamboyantly
dedicated to a borrowed idea of free speech and assembly are the same ones that
have struggled most intensely with groups of users who seek to organize and
disrupt their platforms. A community of trolls on an internet platform is, in
political terms, not totally unlike a fascist movement in a weak liberal
democracy: It engages with and uses the rules and protections of the system it
inhabits with the intent of subverting it and eventually remaking it in their
image or, if that fails, merely destroying it.
But what gave these trolls power on platforms wasn’t just
their willingness to act in bad faith and to break the rules and norms of their
environment. It was their understanding that the rules and norms of platforms
were self-serving and cynical in the first place. After all, these platforms
draw arbitrary boundaries constantly and with much less controversy — against
spammers, concerning profanity or in response to government demands. These
fringe groups saw an opportunity in the gap between the platforms’ strained
public dedication to discourse stewardship and their actual existence as
profit-driven entities, free to do as they please. Despite their participatory
rhetoric, social platforms are closer to authoritarian spaces than democratic
ones. It makes some sense that people with authoritarian tendencies would have
an intuitive understanding of how they work and how to take advantage of them.
This was also a moment these hate groups were
anticipating; getting banned in an opaque, unilateral fashion was always the
way out and, to some degree, it suits them. In the last year, hard-right
communities on social platforms have cultivated a pre-emptive identity as
platform refugees and victims of censorship. They’ve also been preparing for
this moment or one like it: There are hard-right alternatives to Twitter, to
Reddit and even to the still-mostly-lawless 4chan. There are alternative
fund-raising sites in the mold of GoFundMe or Kickstarter; there’s an
alternative to Patreon called Hatreon. Like most of these new alternatives, it
has cynically borrowed a cause — it calls itself a site that ‘‘stands for free
speech absolutism’’ — that the more mainstream platforms borrowed first. Their
persecution narrative, which is the most useful narrative they have, and one
that will help spread their cause beyond the fringes, was written for them
years ago by the same companies that helped give them a voice.
John Herrman is a David Carr Fellow at The New York
Times.
A version of this article appears in print on August 27,
2017, on Page MM18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Online platforms
annexed much of our public sphere, playacting as little democracies — until
extremists made them reveal their true nature.
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