 "Now, Zoho also cancels customer service to neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer")
Chennai-based software as a service (SaaS) giant Zoho has dropped neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer as its customer after the site posted an article inciting hate against a woman who was killed at a white nationalist rally in the US over the weekend.
The website had helped in organising the rally in Charlottesville, which left Heather Heyer dead and 19 others injured when a man ploughed his car into a crowd of protesters that had gathered there.
“We believe that The Daily Stormer has violated Zoho’s Terms of Service, so its access to Zoho’s services has been terminated,” the company wrote on its official Twitter handle.
Zoho follows the likes of GoDaddy and Google, who stopped servicing the Daily Stormer, which is being seen as part of a broader move by the tech industry to police hate speech online. Zoho used to be the website’s email service provider.
GoDaddy announced on Monday morning that it gave Daily Stormer a time limit of 24 hours, during which it would have to move its domain to another provider. The decision was taken as the website violated its terms. When the site tried to move its domain to Google, the tech giant quickly announced that it was dropping them as a customer as well.
Facebook confirmed on Monday that it had taken down the page “Unite the Right” that was used to promote the event in Charlottesville. The article on Daily Stormer is causing a widespread reaction among the entire technology community in the US, and making people discuss the broader topic of hate speech being disseminated online.
Social media has been abuzz with people questioning tech companies why they were offering their services to websites that were inciting hate speech. Google, Facebook and Twitter have often been questioned over their policy on hate speech. Critics have even accused the social media platforms saying they support hate speech, while others blame the firms for suppressing free speech by taking down posts and sites from their respective platforms.
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