There has been a tremendous amount of outrage and unrest following the white supremacist and neo-Nazi violent protests in Virginia. Now, things are getting “virtual”, and while it may be easy to condone alt-right individuals, it’s harder to draw the line when “censorship” is involved.
As we’ve seen with countries like China, Russia, and other middle-eastern countries, sometimes a “good” agenda meant to protect citizens and quell hate speech, can quickly turn sour and rotten. So where can we draw the line on website removal or should we make one at all?
Facebook, Twitter, and even dating apps like Tinder are bazing Nazis left and right. And they can, since users decide to use these platforms and they need to obey the rules. People seem to this this is OK, but even these websites are constantly facing issues worldwide with countries requiring posts to deleted under threats of fines.
Even Google is constantly asked by the European Union to delete search history for individuals at request. But when web host providers like GoDaddy and Google, and cloud-based firewall protection servers like CloudFlare decide to no longer host alt-right content on their servers, is that ok? Is it any different?
CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince seems to think that he made the wrong decision. “I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I don’t think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldn’t be on the internet.”
While Prince’s logic is sound–that it is indeed a slippery slope to remove websites from their servers, it’s still not entirely unheard of. There are a ton of web host providers out there, and they all have a set of rules. If you make a website that goes against the rules of the provider, you can have your website removed. For example, most web host providers don’t host pornographic or explicit content, and in a way, alt-right content could be considered somewhere within that fine print as well. So is it really that big of a deal?
In this case, the website’s content didn’t seem to be against Godaddy’s TOS–but it got deleted anyway. Does that mean that GoDaddy simply needs to add more sections to its TOS? This would also require GoDaddy and Cloudflare to remove all forms of alt-right content, not just the DailyStormer–to remain fair.
By removing all forms of alt-right content, it would be a huge undertaking–and one that would seem to have some sort of political agenda or stance, which no business company focused on making money seems to want to do. This could be the reason that Prince is doubting his decision. You can’t just outlaw one website after all, when countless others most likely have the same objective, if not the same reach.
By removing the website, GoDaddy and Cloudflare could also be introducing a new precedent for how things move forward with web host providers. There are critics out there that thing there should be laws preventing web host companies from removing websites, but at the end of the day, this train of thought seems flawed.
While it makes sense that there are laws and principles around net neutrality to prevent companies from limiting internet access-which the UN thinks is a basic human right, it’s still within federal law for a company to deny service as long as it’s not due to race, religion, or sexuality.
Customers choose a web host, and they need to understand that they are a customer and that while they may own the content, they don’t own the servers–therefore, they could be shut down at any time. However, web host providers like GoDaddy and Cloudflare need to understand that if they remove one website based on political content–no matter how evil or misguided, that they will be setting a precedent for future content removal.
