Where Is the Line? Charlottesville Forces Media and Tech Companies to Decide
This week it took down a truly vile video it produced in January celebrating motorists who had plowed into “liberal protesters,” advising its readers to “study the technique.” (The Daily Caller said on Thursday
that the video was a young videographer’s “clumsy attempt at creating some levity” at a tense time, but added that any suggestion that the video had a role in causing “Nazis to be stupid, violent maniacs is patently absurd.”)
The Fox News website Fox Nation, which apparently liked the video enough to repost
it, also took it down this week, calling it “inappropriate” and expressing regret.
Then again, that list had been out for three years.
We have been organizing on the Internet, so now they’re coming out.”
That came to an end this week when GoDaddy said it would no longer host The Daily Stormer
because its article mocking Ms. Heyer “could incite violence, which violates our terms of service.” The Daily Stormer hit the same problem when it moved its domain to Google, where the “terms of service” also prohibit content that could incite violence.
Google, in keeping with Silicon Valley’s aversion to the news media, would not provide anyone to speak on the record about its policies
but pointed to new moves aimed at starving hateful or violent sites of advertising revenue and to detect and remove terrorist videos.
As a Daily Stormer “feature writer” says on the appropriately praised “Vice News Tonight” documentary on the rally, “As you can see we are stepping off
the Internet in a big way.” Putting a finer point on it, he tells the Vice correspondent Elle Reeve, “People realize they are not atomized individuals.
It may come as a relief that people in high places in the media
and technology world decided it was no longer tenable to give extra oxygen — digital and financial — to those who worship the champions of slavery or march under the Nazi flag, glorifying one of the most morally reprehensible regimes in history.