All right, so the Daily Stormer got kicked off GoDaddy, went to a new hosting company, and then got kicked off that one. Victory? Even the guy who did it isn’t happy he did it.
Confirmed: Cloudflare has kicked “The Daily Stormer” off its network. CEO sent this email to staff. Incredible read. https://t.co/X7naqLO2ce pic.twitter.com/ccwqtZXdcE
— Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) August 16, 2017
I am reminded of when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard all decided to stop accepting payments for Wikileaks, after they published Collateral Murder. (I know many on the left now hate Wikileaks, but at the time these leaks were considered beneficial to the left wing, since it hit a Republican war–Iraq.)
There’s no question that the Daily Stormer amounts to Nazis, I’m not even going to say “neo,” but if you think this won’t be used against the left, well…
NY Governor Cuomo isn’t a Nazi, but he is one the biggest assholes around, having conspired to make sure that Democrats didn’t take control of the NY State legislature, for example, among many other strategies.
If the NYPD had had this law in 2011, nothing would happen to Nazis, but Occupy would’ve seen mass arrests for hate crimes against the rich. https://t.co/TiOAwa40Kg
— Emmett Rensin (@emmettrensin) August 16, 2017
Yeah. Look, historically, censorship laws and so on have always hit the left harder than the right. Any law which can be used against the left will be used against the left.
Protecting the rights of people you hate is the price of protecting your own rights. If you take rights from Nazis, you will be taking them from yourself. At the very least, be sure they are specifically targeted at Nazis, similar to Germany’s laws. If they aren’t, they will be used against you.
As for private power: Concentration of power into a few oligopolies has made private actors able to effectively censor with as much efficacy as government. When Google decided to hit “fake news” somehow that meant that the World Social Website got hit hard.
Concentrated private powers that censor are almost as bad as governments that censor. In some ways, it is worse, because we pretend that places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are not commons, but private, and thus grant them immunity from things like the first amendment, even though they control most of what people see.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.