The Electronic Frontier Foundation may not have given #GamerGate a fair shake, but they seem to be willing to give the supremacist website The Daily Stormer an even hand after Google, Cloudflare, Russian domain hosts, and GoDaddy all opted to ban the Daily Stormer from their hosting services.
BBC picked up the news from a post over on the EFF’s website, where the free speech and open-internet advocate came to Daily Stormer’s defense against the wide-sweeping censorship being employed by the other hosting sites.
In an article published on August 17th, 2017, the EFF writes…
“Even for free speech advocates, this situation is deeply fraught with emotional, logistical, and legal twists and turns. All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with.”
Originally, The Daily Stormer penned an article attacking Heather Heyer, the woman who died during the Charlottesville, Virginia counter-protest when a car struck and killed her. Various organizations disagreed with the Daily Stormer piece that attacked Heyer. Hence, The Daily Stormer was denied hosting services by GoDaddy after Social Justice Warriors utilized a Twitter campaign to bombard GoDaddy, forcing them to act.
Shortly thereafter, The Daily Stormer was given 24 hours to move their website off of GoDaddy, and they did so, moving over to Google’s hosting. However, after further campaigning from Social Justice Warriors, Google also denied The Daily Stormer a place to call home.
As noted by the EFF, Cloudflare, which is used to protect websites against DDOS attacks also dropped them.
According to the EEF, this sort of blanket silencing from those who control so much online real estate is “dangerous”…
“We at EFF defend the right of anyone to choose what speech they provide online; platforms have a First Amendment right to decide what speech does and does not appear on their platforms. That’s what laws like CDA 230 in the United States enable and protect.
“But we strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous.“
It’s not even just American companies either. Russia’s own domain registrar providers have also opted not to deal with Daily Stormer, either, as reported by CNN.
EEF advocates for domain service providers and network infrastructure companies to further separate themselves from the actual content produced by publishers. EEF reminds these companies not to be swayed simply by the media and to “Have A Process, Don’t Act on the Headlines”.
