The Terrifying Power of Internet Censors
I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s more sad than terrifying. Terror implies immediate danger, most people will not feel the danger that shutting down of a Nazi website should entail. Most people are not Nazis.<p>The value of an online community exists within participation from those that visit the website. Anyone that visits can explore the ideology from the perspective of those that believe in it, which is an invaluable tool for education.<p>What happened in Charlottesville was a moment in american history, no matter which side you fall on. What google, godaddy, and cloudflare are doing is (understandably) limiting community engagement on extremist websites. However by doing that it is also restricting those that want to understand who-what-where-when-why-how from accessing the conversations that occurred, and obviously, they did indeed occur. Now, anybody that wants to explore both sides of the event has to do so by navigating a barrage of news articles which loosely throws around the term &quot;nazi&quot;, and a smaller subset of opinion articles which view it as a censorship issue.<p>It makes the stance of anti-censorship &amp; anti-nazi an impossibly difficult stance to take because these two issues are being viewed as two sides of the same issue. This is not conducive to a proactive internet culture. For the first time in history we have the opportunity to explore opposing political&#x2F;race ideologies from inception to protest, and instead of using it to learn about human nature and group think, companies are hitting a mute button to win a popularity contest with investors.