A Lot Of Companies Are Refusing To Service White Supremacists
In the wake of the attacks on Charlottesville, many companies are taking a stand against white supremacy by either removing white supremacist voices from their platforms, or refusing to provide services to other companies that espouse those beliefs. Which, you know, is the right thing to do, and the thing they should have been doing from the day their Terms & Conditions went into effect.
Spotify has removed a number of white supremacist bands from its streaming service. Spotify said in a statement that they take "immediate action to remove any such material as soon as it has been brought to our attention. We are glad to have been alerted to this content - and have already removed many of the bands identified today, whilst urgently reviewing the remainder." Though Spotify's headquarters are in America, the company originated in Sweden, so backlash to the events of Charlottesville is happening on an international level. They were likely alerted to the content by a Digital Music News list of 37 white supremacist bands on Spotify.
Squarespace has dropped a number of prominent white supremacist websites from its services. "In light of recent events, we have made the decision to remove a group of sites from our platform," Squarespace told The Verge. "We have given the site owners 48 hours' notice." Squarespace's Acceptable Use Policy prohibits "bigotry or hatred against any person or group based on their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual preference, age or disability." While Squarespace refused to specify to the Verge which sites it would be dropping, the Outline reports that Richard Spencer, president of the white supremacist think tank the National Policy Institute, was one of the members dropped.
Apple Pay and PayPal have also both disabled payment support to websites that sell white supremacist merchandise. In a blog post, PayPal notes that its Acceptable Use Policy prohibits their services from being used to accept "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance." The company also wrote that "PayPal strives to navigate the balance between freedom of expression and open dialogue -- and the limiting and closing of sites that accept payments or raise funds to promote hate, violence and intolerance."
We’ve seen the terror of white supremacy & racist violence before. It's a moral issue - an affront to America. We must all stand against it
- Tim Cook (@tim_cook) August 14, 2017
Uber, who was the target of a mass boycott after breaking a taxi strike at JFK airport against Trump's Muslim ban executive order, banned James Allsup from the service after an Uber driver kicked him, and "alt-right" member Tim Gionet, out of her car for allegedly making racist remarks while driving past the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Gionet posted a video of the incident to Twitter, claiming he was "sleeping." Uber also emailed their Charlottesville drivers that acts of discrimination and harassment from customers are against their policy.
GoDaddy and Google also denied white supremacist site The Daily Stormer domain registration, forcing it to move to a Russian domain. The site went down again after CloudFlare denied support. In a blog post, CloudFlare said, "Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."
While it's great that more people are taking a stand against white supremacy and hateful ideologies, it's also true that someone had to die for these companies to enforce their own Acceptable Use policies, and many rely on outsiders to bring violating sites to their attention.
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