How the alt-right got kicked offline after Charlottesville from Uber to Google – Washington Post

The alt-right grew up on the Internet. Now, after Charlottesville, some of the far-right movement's most infamous personalities are getting kicked off.

Off Uber, Google and PayPal in one case, kicked off theWeb entirely as tech companies rush to condemnlast weekend's violent white nationalist marches and penalizethosewho condoned them.

I haven't seen them take this much action on all these platforms, ever, said Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long accused tech companies of tolerating hate speech.

I think the shocking images people saw have created enough attention that these companies are taking action, he said. It looks bad if they don't.

Here's our tally of which right-wingpersonalities have been blocked by whichtech giants, and why.

The Daily Stormer, an infamous white-supremacistwebsite, has endured server-related humiliations from its online landlords in the past few days.

The site'sWeb host, GoDaddy,evicted itlast weekend, after the sitepublished an article disparaginga womanwho was killed while protestingthe Unite the Right rally.

GoDaddy, which had long withstood calls to ban the Stormer, accused the siteof violating its terms of service. The Stormerquickly moved its servers to Google, which promptly evicted it, too.

[Why GoDaddys decision to delist a neo-Nazi site is such a big deal]

By Monday, the Verge reported, the site had retreated to the dark Web forced to publish its white-supremacist screeds through anonymous platforms that most people never see. It's also online in Russia, apparently.

Another white supremacist group, Vanguard America, was yanked offline by WordPress after its members rallied inCharlottesville.

[Vanguard America, a white supremacist group, denies Charlottesville ramming suspect was a member]

Uber executives personally thanked and honoreda driverwho kicked three far-right celebrities out of hervehicle before the rally, accusing them of racist comments, someone with the companytold The Washington Post.

The three men Baked Alaska,James Allsup and Millennial Matt caught an Uber ride in Washington a day before the rally.

Millennial Matt whose recently deleted Twitter feed wasfull of Holocaust revisionist material said they were kicked to the curb after hecalled the National Museum of African American History and Culture ugly.

But the driver accused them of worse. In curbsidevideo, the men argue with her about whether they made racist comments in the car.

The companypermanently banned Allsup, invited the driver to givea speech to thousands of otheremployees this week, and defendedher in statement to The Post.

The events surrounding the white supremacist rally in the City of Charlottesville are deeply disturbing and tragic, the companywrote. We stand against this hate, violence, and discrimination. Ubers community guidelines require riders and drivers to treat each other with respect. When a rider or driver doesnt follow these guidelines, we take swift and decisive action, as we did in this instance.

That statement alignsUber with its sedentary counterpart, Airbnb, which cracked down on people suspected of using its service to rent rooms for white supremacist parties during the rally, according to Gizmodo.

Discord, whichis supposed to bea voice chat programfor online gamers, had by 2017 become the alt-right's favorite chat app,as the New York Times put it.

A Times reporter monitoreda far-right Discord serveras it organized for the Charlottesville rally and sawswastikas and praise for Hitler in the chat rooms.

Discord executives knew aboutsuch hate groups before the rally, the Times reported, but cracked down only after the marchesdevolved into violence.

Now the Daily Stormer's Discord server no longer works, among unspecified others.

The most prominent site to be muted may beAltRight.com, which told the gaming site Kotakuthat people in our movement will simply find other alternatives to express their views.

One of the largest crowdfunding sites, GoFundMe,told Reuters that itshut down several campaigns to raise money for the man accused of driving a car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the rally, killing one and injuring many.

Those campaigns did not raise any money and they were immediately removed, a spokesman told the outlet.

Kickstarter, meanwhile,said it hadn't seen any fundraisers for the suspect but had similar policies banning hate speech and the promotion of violence.

[PayPal escalates the tech industrys war on white supremacy]

The online payment giantPayPalwasaccused by the SPLC of allowing hate groups to raise funds for the rally andannounced late Tuesday that it would bar users from taking donations.

The events in Charlottesville are yet another disturbing example of the many forms that racism and hatred manifest, the company wrote. Prejudice, however, does not always march in the street.

The social media behemothsTwitter and Facebookhave beenless active in the backlash against the alt-right, a movement that seeks a whites-only state.

Twitter didn't respond to questions from The Post about its stance on Charlottesville. Earlier this year, the sitecracked down on users accused of hateful conduct, including an avowed white nationalist.

The Twitter account for @Millennial_Matt, one ofrallygoersaccused of racism, was taken offline this week, though it's unclear why.

A tweet from Millennial Matt, whose account was recently deleted. (Twitter)

Although Facebook hasn'treleased a statement on Charlottesville, a company representativetold ThePost that it took down anevent page for the rally over the weekend, after threats of violence and links to hate groups became clear.

Since then, the representative said, Facebook has blocked people from sharing aDaily Stormer article attacking the dead protester, unless the person who shares it explicitly condemns it in the same post.

Limited as thatmove was, it seemedremarkable to some.

The Verge is unaware of any previous moderation effort in which individual employees have assessed every shared caption for a given URL, the tech outlet wrote.

Read more:

A Twitter campaign is outing people who marched with white nationalists in Charlottesville

A live stream of Shia LaBeouf chanting was disrupted by Nazi-themed dancing. Then things got weird.

The only true winners of this election are trolls

J.K. Rowling and Piers Morgan embody the extremes of online celebrity, in one fight

Read this article:
How the alt-right got kicked offline after Charlottesville from Uber to Google - Washington Post

Related Posts

Comments are closed.