The torch-lit march by armed white supremacists recently in Charlottesville, Va., continues to generate debate about how hate groups should be regulated. Amid growing public pressure following the march, internet companies rushed to remove from their platforms websites espousing violent hate speech.
GoDaddy terminated its domain services to neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, as did Google. Cloudflare, a company that protects websites from online attacks, also banned the hate website from its platform. Russia ordered the site barred from being hosted in the country.
My research and my book Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet demonstrate that many internet companies already remove content and ban users “voluntarily” — that is, in the absence of legislation or any judicial processes. Major intermediaries including Google, PayPal, GoDaddy, Twitter and Facebook voluntarily police their platforms for child sexual abuse content, extremism and the illicit trade in counterfeit goods.
Read the full article by Natasha Tusikov at The Conversation.