Silicon Valley Giants Suspend Alt-Right Social Media Profiles and Funding Campaigns. About Time or Overstepping?

After the Charlottesville violence, Silicon Valley giants, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Paypal, and GoDaddy, are choking off tech avenues that hate groups use for crowdsourcing, organizing, and funding. This is a reversal of tech companies’ overall “hands off” approach to censorship and raises free speech concerns. In response to the censorship, alt-right organizations are revolting by creating parallel digital services, essentially birthing an alt-right Internet resembling the dark net. Some believe it is the tech companies’ right to cancel accounts that violate their values and membership agreements. Others think a private company using unregulated editorial judgment, with a profound impact on the ability for American citizens to communicate, is overstepping. What do you think?

What does this censorship look like?

Facebook and Twitter have actively suspended the accounts of white supremacists attached to the violence in Charlottesville, like white nationalist Christopher Cantwell and @Millenial_Matt, a social media personality who showcases the Neo-Nazi agenda. Considering that a third of the world’s population has a Facebook account and Twitter boasts 1.6 billion users per month, the power these social media giants wield is substantial.

The 71 million-website host, GoDaddy, has also chosen to censor users who demonstrate hate speech. For example, on Monday GoDaddy delisted the popular Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, after its founder celebrated the murder of Charlottesville counter-protester Heather Heyer. When the Daily Stormer transferred its website registration to Google, Google also cut off the site.

In regard to funding, Paypal stated intent to remove 34 organizations from its customer base who espouse white nationalism. Apple also dropped funding sources for hate groups. GoFundMe, one of the largest crowdsource sites, deleted campaigns for the driver who murdered protesters in Charlottesville (Jan, 2017).

Promoting violent genocide is flat wrong, why are we even having this discussion?

I’m writing this article partly to impart news in case you didn’t hear it, but mostly to challenge you to think through the implications of Silicon Valley giants making decisions about the sharing of information. In this instance, I happen to agree with the policy that threatening violence should not be tolerated by any of us, government, private companies, or American citizens. The Internet spreads ideas like a virus, with hate groups recruiting people with untrue, manipulative, and inflammatory rhetoric. Vulnerable individuals, particularly the mentally ill and children, are at risk for being duped by sophisticated online grooming techniques. Perhaps Silicon Valley CEO’s have a moral obligation to limit their products’ availability as a tool to spread evil. But then there’s this concern…

What if the information they shut down is a cause you believe in? What if some of the censored activists were promoting unpopular ideas rather than threats or violence? What if the man behind the curtain decides to censor the democratic principles key to American freedom? Where does the slope start to get slippery? Should private corporations be making decisions about blocking pedophiles, terrorists, hate groups, and cults or should that be left to the government? Do we still trust a government that secretly surveilles its citizens, like what was revealed by Edward Snowden? Do we still have confidence in elected government leaders who use Twitter to cyberbully those who disagree with them?

“I’m happy to forfeit informational freedom for security”

Have you heard of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) policy? This program was developed in 2003 by the Pentagon under the direction of retired Adm. John Poindexter as a counter-terrorism measure. Under this policy, later renamed to Terrorism Information Awareness, the United States government aimed to integrate private and government intelligence and surveillance programs to be used as a powerful tool for the use of intelligence, counter-intelligence, and law enforcement. Simply put, that means secretly surveilling American citizens to better “detect, classify, and identify potential foreign terrorists” (The Associated Press, 2003).

On its surface, one may think, “Go ahead and track my online activities. It’s worth giving up some freedom for security. I’m not up to anything anyway.” But consider the fact that your personal online information is vast. The scope of the data collected by TIA included, but was not limited to, your browsing history (what you subscribe to, what your read, who you’re friends with, what you “like,” what you don’t like), financial data like purchases, transfers, and deposits, phone, email, and texting content, geolocation data, travel itineraries and passport data, licenses, judicial (driving and divorce) records, medical records, and biological data like fingerprints, DNA, and gait, face, and iris data. With your private information gathered and stored by the US government, your very identity is available to be hacked by any other entity as well. In the wrong hands, your private information could be used toward your personal devastation, whether you’re up to “no good” or not.

Fortunately in the case of TIA, Congress defunded the program after media reports recognized the alarming potential of “the biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States.” Elements of the program were then absorbed by three-letter governmental agencies and are said to be “quietly thriving” at the National Security Agency (NSA) operating with “little accountability or restraint” (Harris, 2012).

Current law requires that suveilling an American citizen or permanent resident is illegal without a court order. The loophole though, is that surveillance is legal if that citizen is communicating with somebody outside of the United States. Don’t worry though, if you were accidentally caught up in the NSA’s surveillance web, your private data is locked securely in a one million square foot facility in the Utah desert. What could possibly go wrong with that?

From Snopes: The film is authentic. “Don’t Be a Sucker” was produced by the U.S. Signal Corps and distributed by Paramount Pictures for viewing in civilian movie theaters in 1943 and again in 1947. This two-minute clip making the Twitter rounds captures the essence of its anti-fascist message:Where do you stand?

Most of us are frogs in the pot, slowly getting used to giving up our digital freedoms to entities like Facebook in order to gluttonously dine on delicious free Internet content. At what point is enough, enough? Will we get concerned when the government oversteps or when private corporations overstep? Or is privacy something that we are willing to give up for safety and security? Maybe we are OK with adult privacy being violated, but what about our kids? If this stirred you up, please comment in the comments below. Or better yet, “like” the GetKidsInternetSafe Facebook page and start up a conversation.