Companies are just protecting
their bottom lines.
If GoDaddy wasn’t the first,
it was certainly the biggest. The world’s largest domain name registry announced
on Monday that it would boot The Daily Stormer, the online hub for white
supremacists and neo-Nazis who days earlier staged a rally in Charlottesville
and allegedly murdered a 32-year-old protester, from its database.
The floodgates were opened.
Before the week was up, tech companies like Google,
Facebook,
Apple,
Discord,
Cloudflare,
and Spotify—and
even
dating site OK Cupid—were issuing forceful edicts opposing white supremacy
and its adherents, and booting them from their services.
In an age where the president
of the United States defends—and
employs—neo-Nazis, taking a stand against white supremacy has somehow
become a courageous act of corporate activism.
But while all these companies
do deserve credit for demonstrating the kind of leadership Donald Trump has
proven incapable of, their recently discovered intolerance for hatred is just
that: a recent discovery.
Take The Daily Stormer. Its
brand of white supremacy and bigotry might be getting a wider audience now that
it has an ally in the White House, but nothing about the site’s rhetoric is
new. For years,
it has publicly called for white,
Christian rule in the United States and urged violence toward Jews, Blacks,
Hispanics, Muslims, and anyone else who is not white. The site’s extremist
leaders have organized public gatherings, defended the Confederacy, and attacked
those who stand in their way. All the while, major tech companies were
happy to turn the other cheek.
So what changed? GoDaddy
spokesman Dan Race attempted to offer an explanation for the decision to the
New York Times.
“Given The Daily Stormer’s
latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this
type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of
service,” he said. Race was referring to an article on the site that attacked
and mocked Heather Heyer, who was killed
by a car that drove into a group of people protesting white supremacists in
Charlottesville.
Other companies who came out
against hate this week couched their decisions in similar language. They weren’t
policing speech—as many on the right were quick to accuse—but rather enforcing
their own terms of service, most of which have explicit language barring hate
speech. Several companies did not return requests for comment by the time of
publication.
Apple didn’t respond to
ThinkProgress’ requests for comment about what prompted the change of heart
this week. Cloudflare and GoDaddy directed ThinkProgress to previous statements
with boilerplate language about their terms of service.
But as The Daily Beast reported this week, even this enforcement of the companies’
own terms of service is discretionary. Back in July, the online magazine reported
that GoDaddy was hosting The Daily Stormer despite glaring violations of its
own service agreement that read, in part, “don’t even think about using
our service to…engage in morally offensive activity [emphasis theirs].”
When pressed by The Daily Beast at the time about why
The Daily Stormer was allowed to use its services, GoDaddy responded by quietly
deleting entire sections of its terms of service that expressly prohibited
content meant to “defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, or harass third
parties,” or do anything “racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable.”
(Of course, GoDaddy’s commitment to policing “objectionable” content has
always been specious.)
So if it wasn’t escalation on
the part of these white supremacists—they’ve been doing and saying the same
things for years—and if it wasn’t a change of heart by these massive tech
companies, why the sudden stampede to exorcise The Daily Stormer and their ilk
from the internet?
It’s simple, really: It’s all
just business.
These days, it doesn’t take
much more than the threat of a boycott to get companies to behave like good
corporate citizens. Companies are worried about losing the business of
Americans who oppose things like white supremacy, or LGBTQ discrimination, or
sexism — because those are the people who are responsible for an overwhelming
majority of the country’s economic activity.
A Brookings Institute study late last year found that despite
losing the election, the counties that supported Hillary Clinton accounted for
64 percent of the country’s GDP. If you’re a CEO caught between the people
sympathetic to the neo-Nazis who assembled in Charlottesville and the people
horrified by the white nationalist groups that instigated last weekend’s
events, there’s no question which demographic you want to avoid offending.
The evidence bears this out.
Progressives have launched successful campaigns against companies like Target
and Barilla,
and even
Fox News has bowed to pressure after its top-rated show began hemorrhaging
advertisers who were unwilling to anger their customers. When conservatives try
their hand at large-scale boycotts, well…it
doesn’t usually work out.
For years, GoDaddy and its
peers have hosted hate sites like The Daily Stormer without ruffling too many
feathers. That position became untenable the moment James Alex Fields Jr.
revved his engine and plowed into a crowd of anti-hate demonstrators with his car.
Companies ought to be recognized for doing the right thing. But seldom is a
moral high ground paramount to a bottom line.
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