Silicon Valley's Giants Silenced the Far Right. But Is That Their Call to Make?

Where does a big company's power end?

"I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet." That willful line didn't come from a government official. It came from a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Matthew Prince, CEO of the internet company Cloudflare.

Prince wasn't exaggerating.

It has been almost nine days since the far-right site Daily Stormer published, on August 13, an article that enraged the public. For almost all of those nine days the site has been gone from the internet, back up only in windows measured in minutes.

At midday on August 14, the day after the article appeared, GoDaddy, the world's largest domain registrar, announced it would stop serving Daily Stormer and gave the site 24 hours to find a new host. GoDaddy's stated reason: the site had "violated the terms of service."

Without a domain, a website does not exist for the vast majority of internet users.

Daily Stormer had apparently seen it coming. A few hours before GoDaddy's announcement, it filed a transfer request with Google's domain registration service.

In under three hours, Google rejected it on the same grounds.

Google also shut down Daily Stormer's YouTube account along the way. Twitter banned Daily Stormer's account outright. Facebook automatically deleted content linking to the article. Every major social distribution channel outside China had closed its door.

Daily Stormer then approached several other internet infrastructure companies, and was either turned down on the spot or banned soon after. No one would take dailystormer.com.

By the 16th, the site was reachable again through a Russian domain, dailystormer.ru.

But it didn't last. Someone traced the IP address to Scaleway, the French company hosting the site. As soon as Scaleway heard, it locked Daily Stormer's account, and the domain no longer led anywhere.

In the end the main service keeping Daily Stormer alive was Cloudflare, the world's largest service for fending off DDoS attacks.

In theory a website can exist without it. In practice, a site like Daily Stormer, with that many people gunning for it, needs a third-party security service to hold off hackers unless it sits on a big platform like Google or Amazon AWS.

Cloudflare also gives its users CDN caching, which means that even after Scaleway locked the site, visitors could still see pages stored earlier on Cloudflare's servers.

Cloudflare had always refused to police what its customers said, arguing that "speech is not a bomb." Then on the morning of the 16th its CEO wrote that line about waking up in a bad mood and cut the site off.

After that Daily Stormer disappeared from the open internet, reachable only through the encrypted dark web, like a drug bazaar.

It came back to the open web exactly once, on the 18th, with the domain dailystormer.lol from the registrar Namecheap. Namecheap took it down within hours, for the same reason: the content violated the terms of service.

Today Daily Stormer has no direct domain, no account on any major social network, and no presence in Google's search results. The search engine DuckDuckGo still keeps its results, but you can no longer open the pages.

There was no government order. The CEOs of these rival internet companies set up no industry self-regulatory body. And still, Silicon Valley's biggest companies made Daily Stormer's voice vanish from the internet.

It started with a fight in a small town

The event that turned Daily Stormer into a company-wide pariah was a rally that boiled over in Virginia last week.

It was called by the white nationalist Richard Spencer, after the Charlottesville city government voted to remove a local statue of "General Lee."

General Lee was a famous Confederate commander in the American Civil War, known for winning battles against larger forces. Robert E. Lee himself did not support slavery: his wife and children helped a number of slaves win their freedom, and he wrote in a letter home that "slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country."

The people who put up statues of General Lee did not necessarily share his values. A good many of them went up as America's civil rights movement intensified, and KKK and neo-Nazi marches often carry the Confederate flag too.

Racial conflict in the United States has sharpened in recent years. Two years ago the white supremacist Dylann Roof walked into a Black church and shot nine people dead. Like many on the far right, he had posed for photos waving the Confederate flag.

Since then, governments in several cities have begun debating whether to remove statues of Confederate generals who fought for slavery, on the grounds that they inflame hatred.

To protest the removal, white supremacist groups gathered in Charlottesville under the name "Unite the Right" and began their formal demonstration on August 11. Some carried shields; at night they marched with torches, a tribute to KKK rallies of the 1960s.

Plenty of marchers simply waved the swastika flag of Nazi Germany.

Counter-demonstrators gathered too, and on August 12 the situation turned tense. More than a hundred far-right demonstrators massed near Emancipation Park, some of them armed. The local government sent police to break the assembly up. It wasn't enough. At about 1:45 that afternoon, a dark gray Dodge sedan drove into the crowd protesting the far right on one of Charlottesville's narrow streets. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old white woman marching in that crowd, was killed on the spot; another 19 people were injured.

The driver fled and was caught shortly afterward: James Fields, a 20-year-old white supremacist from Ohio.

Daily Stormer became known only after the clash

The day after the rally, Daily Stormer's publisher, Andrew Anglin, published an article titled "Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident Was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut". It said: "However the media pretends to be outraged, most people are glad she is dead. Because she is the very definition of a worthless 32-year-old woman with no children, a useless drag on society... a bottomless pit for public wealth and energy."

Anglin's fixation on "32 and childless" comes out of Nazi doctrine. In Nazi Germany the most important duty of a woman of the superior race was to be a mother and produce more little Nazis. There was even a "Cross of Honour of the German Mother," in three grades: the highest required eight children, the lowest four. It was awarded every year on August 12, the birthday of Hitler's mother.

Daily Stormer is exactly that kind of Nazi-promoting site, and the name says so. It is taken from Der Stürmer ("The Stormer"), a Nazi paper of the World War II era. Its editor-in-chief, Julius Streicher, was a senior Nazi Party figure who preached genocide; after the war the Nuremberg tribunal convicted him and he was hanged.

The site went online in 2013, but most people never noticed it until this article — which made it the first website with no clear illegal conduct to be shut out wholesale by Silicon Valley's mainstream companies.

Trump's three statements brought still more attention

On the day of the attack, Trump's statement did not explicitly condemn what the white racists had done. He said, vaguely, that "we must all come together and condemn hatred in all its forms," and condemn "in the strongest possible terms hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides." He never named the white racists.

A terrorist attack of the kind Europe has seen had just happened, and the American president did not directly condemn the people who committed it. The far right cheered his stance. Daily Stormer, not yet banned at that point, ran a piece praising him: "When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him."

During the campaign, asked what he thought of the white supremacist movement, Trump had also declined to condemn it, saying he didn't know much about those groups. Taken together, his response set off mass protest.

Urged on by his chief of staff, John Kelly, Trump addressed the matter a second time on Twitter on August 14: "Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups."

David Duke, the former KKK leader and Grand Wizard (his formal title in the Klan) who had joined "Unite the Right," then accused Trump of betraying their trust.

On August 15, in an impromptu exchange at Trump Tower in New York, pressed by reporters about the far right, Trump gave an answer that spread the blame evenly. "The right was wrong," he said, "but the left that went there to protest the right was carrying weapons too. People on both sides were violent."

Trump's claim about the left carrying weapons had a basis in fact. Video from that day shows people on both sides armed, and there were physical clashes during the demonstration, though police separated the two sides quickly and no one was hurt in them. But in the end it was a far-right activist who drove a car into a crowd, the way Islamist jihadist terrorists have done in Europe, and it is also a fact that far-right groups of every stripe celebrated it afterward.

American public figures then took sides in public, and almost none of them landed in the "both sides are wrong" camp.

Politicians, of course, spoke. Cory Gardner, a Republican senator from Trump's own party, said: "Mr. President, we must call evil by its name. This was domestic terrorism."

One businessman after another quit Trump's advisory councils; even BlackRock's CEO, who had been in frequent contact with him, walked out. In the end Trump dissolved both councils.

Serving military leaders, who normally avoid commenting on politics, spoke publicly as well. All five chiefs on the Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned the attack on social media — the top commanders of the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and National Guard. Each statement stood not just for the man but for his whole service. Admiral John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, wrote on Facebook: "The events in Charlottesville are shameful and unacceptable, and can never be tolerated. The U.S. Navy will never tolerate hatred of this kind."

In the end even the younger Murdoch, James Murdoch, CEO of Trump's favorite network, Fox News, wrote in an email: "I can't believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential. There are no good Nazis, no good Klansmen and no good terrorists."

But as with several lopsided moments during the campaign, the public figures' clarity was not the whole picture. In a survey conducted last week by the research firm SurveyMonkey, 40% of respondents said both sides in the demonstration bore equal responsibility for the deaths and injuries.

Trump's election and the far right's current activity alike plainly rest on a real base of support among Americans.

As the story grew, the internet companies' blockade began

Daily Stormer was only a starting point. The blockade of the white supremacist movement spread to Silicon Valley companies across every kind of internet service.

Airbnb moved first. Four days before the Charlottesville demonstration, it announced it was suspending the accounts of users it believed had booked rooms on its platform in order to attend the rally.

That was more a statement of position — Airbnb could not actually stop the rally from happening. In its statement, the company said its community members "must accept people regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation or age."

After Daily Stormer was knocked offline several times, more internet companies joined in, each blocking the extremist group on whatever service it controlled.

Silicon Valley tech companies have always held liberal positions. In the past they would issue statements and donate to groups they agreed with, but they would not shut down the other side.

The mood is changing.

The most direct move was to cut off channels for speech. Beyond the infrastructure companies already mentioned: after the bloodshed, Facebook deleted Daily Stormer's article links and event pages; Twitter purged the organizers' accounts; Reddit closed a forum full of related violent rhetoric. Those three social platforms cover nearly every online channel for speech in America.

The payment companies came next. PayPal said first that it would stop offering payment and transfer services to extremist groups; then the traditional financial institutions Discover, Visa and Mastercard cut off support for these sites one after another, the latter two being the world's two largest credit card payment networks; Apple Pay announced on the 16th that it would no longer serve the same sites. Sites preaching white supremacy had lost mainstream payment entirely.

The crowdfunding site GoFundMe, separately, removed several campaigns raising money for the suspect James Fields; they were later replaced by campaigns for the victims.

If domains, speech and money are an extremist group's lifelines, then some internet services' actions look like no real threat at all.

Uber announced on the 17th that it would no longer serve white supremacists, which is an impossible promise to keep, since it cannot vet every passenger. The only case anyone produced was a rider who made racist remarks in the car and was reported by a Black woman driving; Uber then closed three passengers' accounts.

Quite a few tech companies look less like they decided than like they were pushed.

Take the streaming music service Spotify, which announced it had deleted a number of hate-minded bands and their songs. The problem is old: in 2015 the press already pointed out 37 such bands on its platform, and iTunes removed them at the time. Fixing it only now, Spotify looks by any measure like a company under pressure from public opinion.

Most of the other companies, too, acted only after taking public heat.

The most direct measures, and probably the most important, came domain by domain.

"@GoDaddy you're hosting the domain for The Daily Stormer, who posted this [screenshot of the offensive article]. If you think this type of speech should be banned, please RT." That post by Amy Siskind, president of a women's and LGBTQ organization, was retweeted tens of thousands of times before GoDaddy revoked the domain.

Every registrar that took on the Daily Stormer site faced the same question: GoDaddy and Google acted, so why are you sitting still?

Before Twitter shut the account down, plenty of people were tagging founder Jack Dorsey: "Even GoDaddy and Cloudflare have come out against the Nazis. Is Twitter going to follow the crowd, or keep giving Nazis a platform the way it always has?"

A few tech companies are pushing back against the trend. Gab, a social app popular with the right, insists that tolerating extreme speech is how it defends free speech. After Google Play pulled the app, Gab raised $1 million on its own and described itself as "an ad-free social network for creators who believe in free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online". It accused the tech companies of Orwellian authoritarianism and mocked Mark Zuckerberg as "Stalinberg."

The irony piles up: liberals on Twitter accuse Zuckerberg of sheltering Nazis; American neo-Nazi sites call him a Jew preparing to persecute white people and say the Russians are the real friends; and a competitor like Gab calls him a Russian dictator, a Stalin.

Gab has even said it will build a "completely free operating system," and plans to raise $500 million through an ICO.

Gab was once part of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's biggest incubator, before being shown the door.

The well-known ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) became a target of public anger this time as well. It is a large nonprofit legal aid organization headquartered in New York, founded in 1920, whose purpose is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States."

The local government had originally rejected the right-wing groups' application to assemble in Emancipation Park on safety grounds; the organizers sued in federal court, citing the First Amendment, and the march was finally approved. Throughout, the left-leaning ACLU backed their right to demonstrate.

The ACLU has always insisted on protecting citizens' First Amendment rights regardless of faction or values. It has defended the right of Nazis to march before.

This time its support for a far-right rally drew fierce criticism. Waldo Jaquith, a member of the ACLU's Virginia board, resigned. On Twitter he put it this way: "I've resigned from the board of the ACLU of Virginia. What is legal and what is right are sometimes not the same thing, and either way, I won't be helping Nazis."

After the deaths and injuries, the ACLU said in a statement that it would reconsider the limits of protecting groups' right to assemble freely — at minimum by confirming that the people involved are unarmed and show no violent tendencies.

Silicon Valley's giants took the Nazis offline this time. Who's next?

The Nazi extremism Daily Stormer stands for is hard for anyone to sympathize with. But not every position is as black and white as Nazism.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), which has no sympathy for Nazis, published a blog post condemning the tech companies' collective muting of neo-Nazi figures and sites.

These tools for blocking hateful speech, the EFF wrote, will eventually work against the civil rights organizations fighting for freedom, and the big tech companies will one day turn them around to silence those groups.

The EFF put it this way: "We protect free speech not because we support the content of any particular speech, but because we believe that neither governments nor commercial organizations have the right to interfere with free expression."

The tech companies that muted Daily Stormer may in fact face lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the government may not restrict discriminatory or hateful speech that carries no direct threat. There is no precedent for companies controlling speech, because companies have never had that power.

Cloudflare's Prince, who said he pulled the plug because he got out of bed on the wrong side, admitted publicly at the same time that what he did was a problem.

Prince, who still teaches as an adjunct law professor, said in public that he made the call because people at Daily Stormer had claimed Cloudflare was a secret backer of the Nazis, and he didn't want to be taken for one of them. He could do it because the company's terms of service gave him the power to.

He also saw the danger in it as he decided. Speaking to The Verge afterward, Prince said:

"This was my decision. I don't think it's Cloudflare's policy, and I think in many ways it was a very dangerous decision."

"I think that we as internet companies need a consensus about the limits of what companies do, with clear rules and a framework. My complaints, or Jeff's (Bezos, Amazon's founder), or Larry's (Page, Google's founder), or Satya's (Nadella, Microsoft's CEO), or Mark's (Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder), shouldn't decide what gets to be online. I think the people behind Daily Stormer are loathsome, but I don't think my own politics should decide what is allowed to exist on the internet."

"But until we settle this particular problem, there is no way for us to have that discussion and reach that consensus."

Most internet companies have not discussed any of this in public. When they shut a site out, they mostly just say it violated the terms of service, so the service stopped.

Today, a dozen or so Silicon Valley companies that control internet infrastructure can make a voice disappear completely. And the people who make that call don't have to explain why.

Sounds familiar.

Cover image from Getty Images