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Apple disables Apple Pay functionality for white supremacist websites, online storefronts

This is pretty significant.

On Wednesday, Apple confirmed that the company had disabled Apple Pay functionality for websites that sell apparel and paraphernalia from white nationalists and hate groups.

The discontinuation of service applies to garments with Nazi logos, t-shirts sporting the phrase “White Pride,” and a bumper sticker showing a car plowing into stick figure demonstrators. The move follows Saturday’s Charlottesville demonstrations, where one woman was killed by a car driven by a white nationalist. As a result, the company blocked three white nationalist sites from using Apple Pay.


Apple has yet to provide comment for this story, although a company spokesperson referred journalists to the company’s guidelines for Apple Pay, which forbid the service’s incorporation into sites promoting hate, intolerance, and violence. Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to employees Wednesday night announcing donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, saying that he disagreed with the president drawing a moral equivalence between Nazis and white nationalists and those who opposed them.

Apple, along with several other technology companies, has moved to distance itself from the websites and social media accounts of white nationalist and white supremacist organizations. On Monday, web host GoDaddy and search giant Google removed the registration capabilities of The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist blog, in response to its posts about the events in Charlottesville.

“We’ve seen the terror of white supremacy & racist violence before,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote on Twitter on Monday. “It’s a moral issue – an affront to America. We must all stand against it.”

In addition, Uber, Facebook, Twitter, MailChimp and WordPress have all taken varying levels of action as well as least partially discontinued their services for white supremacist organizations following the events in Charlottesville. Airbnb has banned users tied to such groups from using its site to book lodging for last week’s rally and assorted CEOs from the business world, including the head of Intel, have resigned from President Donald Trump’s manufacturing council over what they saw as Trump’s inadequate condemnation of the violence and rhetoric from racist groups over the weekend. On Wednesday, Trump disbanded two major business councils following a cascade of member resignations.

Apple has removed Apple Pay capabilities from sites such as americanvikings.com and vinlandclothing.com, the latter of which sells apparel with Nazi logos. The company has cited that the sites were in violation of “acceptable use guidelines” that state that users may not incorporate its payment service into a site that “promotes hate, violence, or intolerance based on race, age, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.”

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

Via BuzzFeed News