Tech Censorship of White Supremacists Draws Criticism From Within Industry
Tech Censorship of White Supremacists Draws Criticism
From Within Industry
The moves by tech companies like Cloudflare have been
chided for threatening freedom of expression online
By Yoree Koh Updated Aug. 19, 2017 8:28 a.m. ET
The debate intensified over whether the growing number of
tech companies that blocked white supremacists and a neo-Nazi website on the
internet have gone too far, as a prominent privacy group questioned the power a
few corporations have to censor.
The Chief Executive of Cloudflare Inc., one of several
internet companies this week to cut ties with Daily Stormer, effectively
preventing the neo-Nazi website from appearing on the web, admitted he set a
troubling precedent.
“As [an] internet
user, I think it’s pretty dangerous if my moral, political or economic whims
play some role in deciding who can and cannot be online,” Matthew Prince, CEO
and co-founder of Cloudflare, said in an interview.
On Thursday, the nonprofit privacy group Electronic
Frontier Foundation said tech companies including Cloudflare, GoDaddy Inc. and
Google, part of Alphabet Inc., threatened freedom of expression online by
blocking Daily Stormer. The three tech companies pulled support for Daily
Stormer after it published a story denigrating Heather Heyer, the 32 year-old
woman killed in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend. The moves made Daily
Stormer’s website inaccessible.
“Protecting free speech is not something we do because we
agree with all of the speech that gets protected,” the EFF said in a statement.
“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.”
Over the past week, tech companies including Facebook
Inc., Twitter Inc., and GoFundMe Inc. removed white supremacists from their
platforms, overthrowing the image some of the companies convey of being neutral
platforms with free-speech principles.
On Thursday, Spotify said it began removing
white-nationalist acts from its music-streaming platform. “Illegal content or
material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality
or the like is not tolerated by us,” a Spotify spokesman said in an emailed
statement. Dating site OkCupid, part of Match Group Inc., said it banned Chris
Cantwell, a white supremacist who participated in the Charlottesville riots,
within 10 minutes of being alerted that he used the service this week.
Mr. Prince said that while he and Cloudflare employees
had long thought of Daily Stormer’s content as “repugnant,” Daily Stormer
crossed the line when it claimed that Mr. Prince and others at the company
secretly supported its views. Daily Stormer was the first time the company
removed a client for reasons other than under court order or for explicit
violations of their terms of service.
Cloudflare protects sites from denial-of-service attacks,
which make sites slower and more vulnerable to attack. About 2.4 billion people
pass through Cloudflare’s network every month, according to Mr. Prince.
The EFF said “states and malicious actors” often turn to
denial-of-service attacks when they try to silence voices. Cloudflare’s
decision to deny security against these kinds of attacks to Daily Stormer
signals that they can pick and choose clients, making it more difficult for
them to fend off external pressure in the future, the EFF said.
The censorship of Daily Stormer was decided by
behind-the-scenes actors that are little known to the general public, rather
than players like Facebook and Twitter, the ostensible windows of the internet
that are in direct contact with users, making the moves more unsettling, said
Mr. Prince.
Mr. Prince said he hopes his decision will spur conversations
around how to handle controversial content. One of the first of those occurred
Friday afternoon at Cloudflare’s San Francisco headquarters, where Mr. Prince
faced questions from about 200 employees at a weekly employee gathering. The
questions included, “How are you explaining this to your parents?” according to
Mr. Prince.
“It’s so critical that as a society we ask, ‘was that
good?’” Mr. Prince said after the meeting of his decision to ban Daily Stormer.
“If we simply provoke that question that would be a very positive outcome for
what has been a hard week.”
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