On Wednesday, VDARE.com, a conservative website focused on immigration, announced its domain name registrar would be terminating its account.
Lydia Brimelow wrote:
This Monday, June 15th, Network Solutions, our domain name registrar, suddenly gave us 10 days’ notice of its intention to terminate our account, after some 20 years. It gave no specific reasons beyond alleged violations of its Acceptable Use Policy, but said “we consider your continued use of our services a serious issue and risk to our business and corporate reputation.”
“Network Solutions is only the most recent example corporate complicity in the suppression of Free Speech across America,” Brimelow added. “But it’s perhaps the most shocking. To my knowledge, withdrawal of registrar services has never happened to a site as mainstream as VDARE.com.”
This is one in a series of recent moves by tech companies to censor conservatives online.
On Tuesday, June 16, Google announced it would ban the site Zero Hedge from its Google Ads program.
Around the same time, NBC News tried to get Google to pull its ads program from The Federalist but ultimately failed. Co-founders Ben Domenech and Sean Davis were unaware of the effort to demonetize The Federalist until they received a request for comment from an NBC reporter. “Google never formally notified us that we had run afoul of any of its rules,” wrote Domenech and Davis in the Wall Street Journal. “Only when we sought guidance from Google about the NBC News story were we told that our comments section—which is run by a third party and isn’t monitored or moderated by us—violated its policies.” Google spared their publication with a warning.
On the same day VDARE.com’s article was published, Bloomberg Technology reported Republican Senator Tom Cotton had received a call from “low-level” Twitter employee who threatened to permanently lock his account unless he deleted a tweet that advocated using the military to quell unrest throughout the U.S. and used the term “no quarter.”
The next day, Facebook removed posts and ads run by the re-election campaign of President Donald Trump, claiming the ads violated its policy against organized hate.
Tech companies increasingly appear undeterred by the president’s executive order to prevent online censorship while conservatives continue to go it alone.
“Of course, we’re fighting back,” wrote Brimelow. “We will never kneel. Our lawyer has challenged Network Solutions. And my team and I are actively searching for an alternative registrar solution. We hope we will find one. But we know it is likely only a matter of time before the new company caves under Antifa pressure, too.”