Blocking neo-Nazi site is 'dangerous,' warns digital rights group EFF

Rachel Sandler | USA TODAY

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, broke with major tech companies late Thursday, saying that blocking white supremacist, Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer from staying online sets a dangerous precedent for free speech.

"Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected," a post on its website reads. "We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t."

One by one, tech companies providing online services to The Daily Stormer dropped the site this week after a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Va. last weekend turned deadly. Both GoDaddy and Google revoked the site's domain registration. Zoho, Sendgrid and Discord, each providing email or chat services to the site, were next.

Cloudflare, a security firm that had continued to do business with the site, cut ties mid-week. The last straw: Daily Stormer's owners called Cloudflare "one of us," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said, while nodding to his ambivalence about ditching the service earlier. "The real risk is in choosing winners and losers, and which of their content survives," he told USA TODAY.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation echoed that concern, saying that neither the government nor private commercial enterprises "should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t."

While the EFF acknowledges that private companies are well within their rights to remove anyone from their platforms, the non-profit emphasized that what GoDaddy, Google and Cloudflare did was "dangerous" with far-reaching consequences.

"We would be making a mistake if we assumed that these sorts of censorship decisions would never turn against causes we love," the post reads.

"We must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with," it said. "Those on the left face calls to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as a hate group."

The EFF defense of The Daily Stormer's right to remain online reflects a similar debate within the American Civil Liberties Union about the tension between hate speech and free speech. The ACLU's California chapters broke with the rest of the national organization Wednesday by denouncing white national violence and declaring in a statement that "white supremacist violence is not free speech.”