“One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred,” wrote Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in 2013. “There will be things on our network that make us uncomfortable,” Prince wrote. But “we will continue to abide by the law, serve all customers, and hold consistently to a belief that our proper role is not that of Internet censor.”
Recently, this stance put Prince in a really uncomfortable position. Cloudflare was providing service to the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that published an article trashing Heather Heyer, a victim of lethal violence during the Charlottesville protests. So under pressure from anti-racism activists, Cloudflare dropped the hate site as a customer. The move caused Daily Stormer to go down for more than 24 hours.
“We uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible,” Reddit said in 2014. But within months, the site started banning communities devoted to racism and misogyny. Twitter said in 2014 that the company represented “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” But more recently it has ramped up efforts to combat harassment on its platform, notably banning right-wing Internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos.
As the Internet becomes ever more deeply intertwined into our daily lives, online mobs have found ways to cause serious offline harm by stealing and publishing private information, harassing employers and family members, flooding social media accounts with threats and vitriol, etc,. Women, people of color, and the LGBTQA community often bear the brunt of these tactics.
Simultaneously, a shifting political climate has changed how people think about online hate speech. Before Donald Trump’s election—and before racist gunman Dylann Roof murdered nine black people in Charleston, it was easier to dismiss sites like the Daily Stormer. Yes, these were watering holes for evil ideology, but they fundamentally felt like powerless kooks. Nowadays, more people are taking words and threats from extremist groups seriously. Liberal activists have mobilized against these groups, and they’ve found a receptive audience among technology leaders.
Cloudflare’s action is merely the latest example in a broader trend that has been underway for the last few years. Technology companies that once viewed themselves as zealous defenders of free speech have started carving out a big exception for hate speech and online harassment.
Almost everyone can agree that the Daily Stormer is an odious hate site, but critics have warned of a slippery slope. They say that companies are setting a dangerous precedent that could lead to censorship of less offensive speech. And conservatives in particular worry that technology companies will expand the definition of hate speech to cover conservative viewpoints on issues like illegal immigration and gay marriage. How far will this trend go?
Will tech companies eventually ban organizations that explain the Bible’s teaching concerning homosexuals and abortion, or that explain who the beast of Revelation 13 is? The enemy is creating circumstances that will eventually expand efforts to limit discussion of truth online.
“Everything will be placed to obstruct the way of the Lord’s messengers, so that they will not be able to do that which it is possible for them to do now.” Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 6, page 22.
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