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The Tor Project has reiterated its absolutist commitment to free speech, saying that even though Daily Stormer recently moved to a Tor onion service, the organization wont do anything to stop the "hate-spewing website."

Various online services have begun to re-evaluate their willingness to do business with sites that publish obviously vile content in the wake of last weekends violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Earlier in the week, Google removed the Gab app on the Google Play store, andSquarespace said it would disablesome of the offensive sites that it hosts as identified as hateful by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most famously within the tech world, Daily Stormer itself was recently booted from CloudFlares CDN service after the company had initially said it would not do so.

As Steph, a member of the Tor organization, wrote in aThursday blog post:

We are disgusted, angered, and appalled by everything these racists stand for and do. We feel this way any time the Tor network and software are used for vile purposes. But we can't build free and open source tools that protect journalists, human rights activists, and ordinary people around the world if we also control who uses those tools. Tor is designed to defend human rights and privacy by preventing anyone from censoring things, even us.

Ironically, the Tor software has been designed and written by a diverse team including people of many religions, races, gender identities, sexual orientations, and points on the (legitimate, non-Nazi) political spectrum. We are everything they claim to despise. And we work every day to defend the human rights they oppose.

For years, Tor has enabled various obviously illegal websites, ranging fromunderground drug marketplaces, including the recently shutteredAlphaBay,to child porn sites. However, the network also provides similar anonymization tools for innocuous websites likeProPublica, a news organization, andDuckDuckGo, a search engine.

Link:
Tor can't build free and open source tools and stop racists from using them - Ars Technica