The Alt-Right Finds a New Enemy in Silicon Valley
By KEVIN ROOSE at the NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/business/alt-right-silicon-valley-google-memo.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
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A similar fight occurred in July when Patreon and GoFundMe, two crowdfunding sites, banned several accounts associated with the alt-right. One of them was used by Lauren Southern, a Canadian activist and journalist who made a name for herself with inflammatory stunts like disrupting a refugee rescue mission in the Mediterranean Sea. Patreon banned Ms. Southern’s account after deciding that her activities were “likely to cause loss of life,” but emphasized that it was the nature of Ms. Southern’s work, not the political views behind it, that had violated its terms.
“The decision to remove a creator page has nothing to do with politics and ideology,” Jack Conte, Patreon’s chief executive, said in a YouTube video about the incident.
Some company decisions are more explicitly political. At Airbnb last week, the company discovered that several writers and activists affiliated with The Daily Stormer, a white supremacy website, had used its website to book lodging for a right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., and were planning to use rented houses as after-party venues. Airbnb officials canceled the bookings and deleted the users’ accounts, saying that the gatherings violated the company’s “community commitment.”
YouTube, which hosts a thriving community of right-wing personalities — and, not coincidentally, is owned by Google — has come under particularly aggressive criticism from conservative activists, who have accused the site of placing them in a “ghetto” by suppressing their videos.
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