Pressure builds on Twitter to adopt new rules to rein in white nationalists

A coalition of activists, academics and NGOs have called on social media giant Twitter to ban white supremacists in the wake of hundreds of deaths caused by white nationalist attacks globally, including the recent tragedy in El Paso.

The Change the Terms (CTC) coalition, which includes dozens of immigrant, Muslim, minority advocacy and gun control advocate groups, partnered with community members from Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally that saw widespread violence and the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer by James Alex Fields Jr.

“Our country has experienced incomprehensible levels of white supremacist and misogynist violence”, in recent years, Jessica J Gonzalez, Vice President of Strategy and Senior Counsel at Free Press and Co-founder of CTC, said during a press conference. “To El Paso, to Dayton and beyond.”

The terms

CTC has issued the terms it hopes Twitter will adopt, which it claims: “[Will] make it clear that using the service to engage in hateful activities on the service or to facilitate hateful activities off the service shall be grounds for terminating the service for a user.”

During the press call, the fact that many white nationalists responsible for organising events such as the Unite the Right rally still actively use Twitter was raised.

Gonzalez said that Twitter is “historically slow to change and its anti-hate policy is severely limited”, while other social networks like Facebook have taken steps to remove white nationalists.

However, white nationalist rhetoric can extend beyond those commonly associated with it, into the realms of celebrity and politics, Gonzalez said.

The CTC co-founder highlighted statements made by US President Donald Trump about people of Hispanic origin, who have been “repeatedly targeted” after Trump’s tweets depicted Latin Americans as an “infestation”.

White nationalist ‘terror’

The US was shocked by two mass shootings last weekend, one in El Paso, Texas, where a self-declared white supremacist murdered at least 22 people at a Walmart where customers are largely of Hispanic origin.

The El Paso shooter posted a lengthy manifesto which detailed support for a Mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, and belief in the ‘Great Replacement’ white nationalist conspiracist theory, which proposes that elites are replacing white populations with non-white immigrants.  

The other took place in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were killed. According to the Guardian, at least 16 attacks across the world have been ‘motivated’ by white nationalist conspiracy theories in the last eight years.

The majority of these attacks took place in the US, though Greece, Norway and the UK have seen left-wing politicians and activists killed, along with the mass shooting in New Zealand.

These attacks have killed at least 175, the Guardian said.

The murders have fuelled calls to designate white supremacy attacks as domestic terrorism. The El Paso shooting is reportedly being investigated as a hate crime.

The shooter’s manifesto was posted on 8chan, a notorious internet forum known for its racist and paedophilia-related posts.

 “As made explicit in writing connected to the alleged shooter, this act of domestic terrorism carried out in a Texas border community was a targeting of Latinos,” Antonio Arellano, Interim Executive Director of Jolt Action, a Texas Latino voter organisation, said in a statement to TRT World.

Arellano, too, highlighted comments made by Trump, which he claimed were echoed in the shooter’s manifesto.

“This person used the same racist, dehumanising language employed by our current president and cited a ‘Hispanic invasion of Texas’.

“It is undeniable that Trump has normalised the bigotry and hatred that fuelled this,” Arrellano continued. “The dog whistles and blatant racism he uses to drum up support among his base is clearly linked to increasing boldness and violence of white supremacists in our country.”

Trump visited Dayton and El Paso on Wednesday. Residents of El Paso, which sits on the border with Mexico, greeted Trump with protests and local newspaper the El Paso Times published a letter to the president that challenged claims he made earlier this year that a barrier between it and its sister city in Mexico, Juarez, made El Paso safer.

“Our city and Juarez were always linked. Today, we are intertwined more than ever. The evil that visited us targeted people from El Paso and Juarez alike,” the letter said.

Dark anniversary

Trump condemned white supremacy in a speech on Monday as a “sinister” ideology that “must be defeated. Hate has no place in America".

This sounded different to residents of Charlottesville, who heard Trump say there were good people on “both sides” of the white nationalist rally that killed Heyer.

Nearly two years after the rally, “our community here today are still feeling the profound effects” of the rally, said Don Gathers, a community activist, Co-founder of the Charlottesville chapter of Black Lives Matter.

The comment caused controversy nationally and added trauma in Charlottesville, Gathers said in the press call.

The “hate speech” which fuels tragedies has no place in the public sphere, Gathers continued.

Twitter should take “profound” steps to stop its spread.  “As a modern-day society, we have to say ‘enough is enough’,” Gathers concluded.

Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.