As corporate giants like Facebook decide it's bad business, in 2017, to be seen as tolerant of hate speech and racism, they've been banning the most well-known hate groups from their services. This makes sad racists sad.
Jared Taylor, head of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, complained of the “terrible setback” imposed by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other large-scale tech companies in preventing leaders of his movement from reaching new audiences.
“It is a reversion to the pre-internet days when in order to really have access to the public you had to own a newspaper or a magazine or a television network or radio station,” he told TPM in a recent interview. “The internet has vastly democratized this process and made it possible for people not just like us but like Donald Trump to bypass the gatekeepers. What we are going back to is a kind of snuffing out of dissident views. It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”
If Facebook, YouTube, or a company like PayPal was a government service, he'd have a point and the sites would likely be obliged to permit Taylor's hateful rhetoric. But they ain't, and so they aren't obliged to be the spawning grounds of white supremacy and unapologetic fascism if they don't want to be. This is the "free market" nonsense that libertarians are always going on about, up until the exact moment when that market kicks them in the shins.
Peter Brimelow, founder of the site Virginia Dare, which features articles from white nationalist contributors, told TPM in an email last week that his site, which was booted from PayPal, was “earning significant income from Google Adsense [and] Amazon before they purged us.”
How one of the most infamous white nationalist sites on the internet managed to pull in ads from Google and Amazon to fund operations up until now is a good question.
Of all the threats to online white supremacy, however, it's probably the refusal of domain name companies to register their sites that's the most dangerous. Without domain names, the hate sites will be relegated to the deep web, unsearchable and largely undiscoverable to anyone who doesn't already know to look for them. Our nation's Citronella Nazis can always resort to Hitler-themed bake sales and lemonade stands to scrounge for the cash needed to fund their movements. Losing the ability to get their execrable drivel included in search results when new-to-the-net racist bastards are looking for a movement to join, however, won't be as easy to recover from.