BUSINESS/PROTESTS/RACISM: “A prominent Internet rights group has condemned Google and GoDaddy for refusing to manage the domain registration for the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization that defends digital civil liberties, issued a blistering statement on Thursday slamming the domain gatekeepers for using their power to silence speech.
After Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville, The Daily Stormer ran a post mocking her for her physical appearance and using various offensive epithets. This prompted widespread outrage on Twitter, and led GoDaddy to investigate and, ultimately, ban The Daily Stormer for violating its terms of service.
Following this, the neo-Nazi site attempted to register a domain with Google, but that attempt was quickly blocked as well.
Though many around the web were pleased to hear these companies were making an effort to eliminate hate speech from the web, the EFF claims taking such actions sets a dangerous precedent…
Though it harshly condemns hate speech of any kind, the EFF’s post goes on to argue that domain suspension is too broad of a weapon to use against hate speech, because it ‘makes everything hosted [on the domain] difficult or impossible to access,’ and has a high likelihood of blocking speech that wasn’t targeted.
The main concern expressed by the EFF is that eliminating websites full of hate speech is a slippery slope.”
-Nick Vega, “Internet rights group slams Google and GoDaddy’s ‘dangerous’ decision to ban a neo-Nazi site,” Business Insider, Aug. 18, 2017