(Washington, D.C.) – Following action taken by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Network Solutions has acted against two white supremacist sites, niggermania.com and VDARE.com. Last month, the Lawyers’ Committee issued a demand letter to Network Solutions, a subsidiary of Web.com, alerting the company to the fact that these sites were in violation of the company’s Acceptable Use Policies.
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said: “We have seen what happens when these types of websites are left to fester. Sites that incite violence and promote racially hostile views, whether in the form of memes or dressed up as academic pseudo-science, have been connected with heinous crimes. Taking down these sites is an important step in disrupting white supremacist online communities.”
Clarke continued: “These sites promote white supremacist organizing activity and are used to dehumanize minorities, such that violence against them is justified and encouraged.”
The n-word site was dedicated to pushing violent statements and disinformation about racial and ethnic minorities. For instance, numerous posts called for the enslavement of Black people and promoted violence against Black Americans. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, VDARE.com was originally established in 1999 and is an anti-immigrant hate website that regularly publishes articles by white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites. As detailed in the Lawyers’ Committee’s letters to Network Solutions, the type of content featured on both sites regularly violated Network Solutions’ Acceptable Use Policies that prohibit racist content, encouraging violence, and spreading disinformation. Following receipt of the Lawyers’ Committee’s demand letter, Network Solutions announced that it would stop providing domain registration services to the site.
Perpetrators of hate violence against communities of color tend to frequent online platforms. For example, the shooters who carried out violent and deadly attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, El Paso, Texas, and Charleston, South Carolina were all active in online white supremacist message forums that regularly disparaged racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has been engaged in national efforts to combat hate and the spread of white supremacy. Following the hate rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Lawyers’ Committee was successful in advocating for Network Solutions to terminate web hosting services to Stormfront.com.
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