Beyond CEOs who used to belong to the American Manufacturing Council but quit over the response of President Donald Trump to the Charlottesville clashes when he apparently took the side of white supremacists, technology giants in the US are also joining the fight against racism.
Goodbye white power music
The Guardian reported that Spotify, the giant music subscription service, started to remove White Power Music. These are music that was flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center as racist hate bands. A spokesman for the company said that Spotify does not tolerate illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, or sexuality.
The spokesman said the service will immediately take action to remove any material which has been brought to its attention. Spotify has already removed many of the bands flagged by the SPLC, while the company is reviewing other music flagged.
The SPLC published in 2014 a list of White Supremacist hate bands. Digital Music News, however, pointed out that majority of these groups are still in Spotify. Among the bands still on Spotify are Ad Hominem, Blood Red Eagle, Condemned 84, Dark Fury, Granulosum, Kolovrat, LegittimaOffesa, Prussian Blue, Skinfull, Thunderbolt, and White Knuckle Driver.
When it searched for other hate groups on Spotify, Digital Music News found eight more. These are Endless Pride, Hate Forest, Bolzer, No Remorse, Centurion, Nokturnal Mortum, Berserker, and Kolovrat.
Apple donates to SPLC
Those on the list provided by Digital Music News could be the ones that Spotify said it is still reviewing. Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged to donate $1 million to the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League. In a memo sent to Apple employees, Cook, who quoted Martin Luther King, said that Apple must not witness or permit such hate and bigotry in the country and must not be equivocal about it.
Beyond the donation, Apple Pay also disabled payment support for websites that are selling white nationalist and Nazi clothing. It includes americanvikings.com and viinlandclothing.com which are actually little-known sites, Buzzfeed reported. The websites sell sweaters with Nazi logos, T-shirts with the “White Pride” phrase, and a bumper sticker in which a vehicle plowed into demonstrators. Other tech giants, such as Google and GoDaddy, have removed The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist blog.
