WhiteSupremacy
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US Homeland Security Committee subpoenas 8chan owner
The House Committee on Homeland Security has subpoenaed 8chan owner Jim Watkins to testify before congress after the site was linked to a deadly mass shooting in El Paso. "At least three acts of deadly white supremacist extremist violence have been linked to 8chan in the last six months," wrote Chairman Bennie G. Thompson and Ranking Member Mike Rogers.
Facebook and Instagram are banning white nationalism and separatism
Facebook is banning white nationalism and separatism material from its platform and Instagram as of next week, following a prior ban on white supremacy. It will prohibit praise, support and representation of the ideologies, including specific phrases such as "I am a proud white nationalist" and "Immigration is tearing this country apart; white separatism is the only answer," as Motherboard first reported.
Subpoenaing Discord may reveal identities of Charlottesville neo-Nazis
The white supremacist Charlottesville marchers who used Discord to prepare for violence might not remain anonymous for much longer. A chief magistrate judge has shot down an attempt by one of the neo-Nazis to dismiss a subpoena for Discord that would identify her and roughly 30 other users who reportedly relied on the chat app ahead of the event last year. She maintained that exposing her identity would violate her First Amendment rights to "anonymous speech" and put her in danger, but the judge disagreed. The plaintiffs' interest in identifying her as a possible perpetrator or witness outweighed her anonymity, according to the magistrate.
Pepe The Frog’s creator sues Infowars for copyright infringement
Despite artist Matt Furie's attempts to reclaim his Pepe The Frog character from neo-Nazis, his cartoon is still being used by the far-right. He created Pepe in the early 2000s and has described the character as a "peaceful frog-dude" whose true nature "celebrates peace, togetherness and fun." But in 2015, the far-right began to appropriate Pepe, using him as a representation of hate, white supremacy and anti-Semitism and the character became tied to racists and conspiracy theorists like Richard Spencer and Mike Cernovich. Furie has tried to reclaim Pepe through a #SavePepe campaign and by issuing cease-and-desist notices to those using its image and companies like Amazon, Google and Reddit whose sites hosted infringing content. He even tried to kill off the character last year. Now, he's going after Infowars.
The real villain in ‘Wolfenstein II’ is a complicit America
Wolfenstein: The New Colossus improves on everything you liked in the franchise's soft reboot, 2014's Wolfenstein: The New Order. The action, set pieces, characters and writing are all sharper this time around. So is the thoughtful terror in the alternate universe's setting. After striking a blow in Europe against the global Nazi regime in the first game, The New Colossus brings protagonist BJ Blazkowicz and his anti-Nazi crew back to the US — where they find many Americans have gleefully accepted Nazi rule.
'Destiny 2' studio explains how a hate symbol made it into the game
Earlier this week, Destiny 2 developer Bungie announced that it had become aware of some armor in the game that looked a lot like a symbol used by white supremacists. The company apologized, noted that the symbols didn't represent its values and said the offending armor would be removed.
Neo-Nazi site Stormfront has been temporarily taken down
The post-Charlottesville removal of neo-Nazi content from various web sources continues to power on as the long-standing website Stormfront has, for now, been taken down. A Whois search shows that Web.com domain provider Network Solutions LLC has put a hold on the website and as the Knoxville News Sentinel reports, the hold prohibits the site from being updated, transferred or deleted. If the domain provider decides to delete Stormfront, any subsequent version hosted elsewhere would have to be recreated from scratch.
Discord chats may be crucial to lawsuits over neo-Nazi violence
Discord was quick to shut down neo-Nazi servers and accounts in the wake of racist violence in Charlottesville, but that doesn't mean those conversations are gone forever. In fact, they may be instrumental to making criminal cases and lawsuits stick. The media collective Unicorn Riot has obtained leaked Discord chat screenshots (about 1,000 of them) and audio suggesting that many of the white supremacists were gearing up for a fight even as their organizers were supposedly calling for non-violence. In the days after the Charlottesville march, they also made light of the car attack that murdered Heather Heyer and injured many others.
EFF warns blocking neo-Nazi sites may threaten free speech
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has criticized internet providers for blocking the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, saying it violates the principals of free speech and could backfire. "We strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google and Cloudflare did here was dangerous," it said in a blog post. "We would be making a mistake if we assumed that these sorts of censorship decisions would never turn against causes we love."
Squarespace pulls hate sites from its web hosting service
The post-Charlottesville crackdown on internet hate speech is expanding at a very rapid pace. Squarespace, the web design and hosting service, has revealed to The Verge that it's removing a "group of sites" for violating its policy banning advocacy of bigotry and hate. The company isn't saying which sites are getting the axe, but it's giving the affected producers 48 hours' notice before their pages vanish.
Apple starts removing Apple Pay from white nationalist sites
Apple has suspended support for Apple Pay on a handful of websites selling white-supremacy clothing and accessories, joining a cascade of technology companies currently cutting off hate groups online. Apple Pay no longer works on at least two websites selling clothes, bumper stickers and other items stamped with Nazi imagery and hate speech, Apple confirmed to Buzzfeed. One site sells a sticker depicting a car running down a group of people, complete with the words, "Nobody cares about your protest."
Facebook and Reddit ban hate groups in wake of Charlottesville
It's not just domain registrars and game chat services that are cracking down on neo-Nazis in the wake of the racism-fuelled violence in Charlottesville. Facebook and Reddit have both confirmed that they've shut down numerous hate groups in the wake of the attacks. Reddit tells CNET that it shut down the /r/Physical_Removal subreddit for content that "incites violence" and thus violates its content policy. Users in the group hoped that people in anti-hate subreddits and at CNN would be killed, supported concentration camps and even wrote poems about killing.
Gaming chat app Discord starts shutting down racist accounts
Google and GoDaddy aren't the only internet companies dumping racists in light of the violence in Charlottesville. The team behind the gaming chat app Discord has shut down both accounts "associated with the events in Charlottesville" and the altright.com chat server. As the company explains, it plans to take action against "all forms of hate," and that its mission is "positivity and inclusivity" -- it doesn't believe gamers will feel welcome if racists have a home in the app.
Google cancels neo-Nazi site's registration in a matter of hours
If the white supremacists at Daily Stormer thought they were going to get a warm reception from other web service providers after GoDaddy gave them the boot, they were clearly mistaken. Google says it's cancelling the neo-Nazi website's domain registration a mere 3 hours after it signed up. A Google spokesperson tells us that DS was "violating our terms of service." The domain is still listed as registered with Google as of this writing, but it's likely going to take some time before the change is reflected in public databases.
GoDaddy dumps white supremacist site 'Daily Stormer' (updated)
White supremacist website Daily Stormer just lost its web domain. In a tweet, GoDaddy claims it's giving the site "24 hours" to move to another domain provider, having found it to be in violation of its terms and services. The announcement came in response to a Twitter appeal from The New Agenda co-founder Amy Siskind, who pointed out an article by the neo-Nazi publication. In the piece, Daily Stormer used obscene language in regards to Heather Heyer -- the woman who was killed in Charlottesville on Saturday after a man rammed his car into a crowd of people. Heyer was among those protesting against the Unite the Right white supremacist rallies over the weekend.
Twitter reinstates racist leader's account
Twitter was supposed to have cracked down on "alt-right" racism back in mid-November, but it appears to be having second thoughts. The social network has reinstated the account of Richard B. Spencer, the white nationalist leader whose groups were an important part of the crackdown. He'd originally been banned based on Twitter rules barring "violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct and multiple account abuse," although there weren't clear examples of violations at the time.
Recommended Reading: Meet the attorney who's fighting revenge porn
The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker Carrie Goldberg started her practice to "be the lawyer" she needed after being harassed online by an ex. Now she's a pioneer is dealing with revenge porn cases, defending victims against hacking, leaking and other online attacks when relationships come to an end.
Fake news sites are using Amazon to hire their writers
It appears that right wing websites that traffic in "alt-right" fake news are using Amazon's Mechanical Turk system to recruit writers to produce content for them. The Mechanical Turk platform is an "odd-job board" where companies can hire random folks from the internet to perform a variety of menial online tasks, like filling out surveys or transcribing audio. In this case, white supremacist outlet The Goldwater wants people to produce "news" articles for $5 a pop.
Google pulls Chrome extension used to target Jewish people
Following a detailed investigation by Mic, Google has pulled a Chrome extension that was used by racists to identify and track Jewish people online. The plugin, called "Coincidence Detector," added a series of triple parentheses around the surnames of Jewish writers and celebrities. For instance, visiting the page of Mic writer Cooper Fleishman, you'd see his surname presented as (((Fleishman))) -- turning the symbol into the digital equivalent of the gold star badge used to identify Jews in Nazi Germany. Until Google banned it for violating its policy on hate speech, the plugin had just under 2,500 users and had a list of 8,768 names that were considered worthy of tracking.
