Several popular online dating platforms and social networking websites in the United States have started to ban hate speech and white supremacists in the wake of the Charlottesville violence.
Days after the deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, a historic college town in the U.S. state of Virginia, the matchmaking site OKCupid said via Twitter that it had banned a newly famous white nationalist.
The man, Christopher Cantwell, gained notoriety for taking part in Charlottesville nationalist rallies. He has turned himself in to Lynchburg Police Department in Virginia soon after he was put on the wanted list.
"Yesterday, members of the OkCupid community alerted us that white supremacist Christopher Cantwell was on OkCupid. We banned him within 10 minutes. We make a lot of tough decisions every day. This was not one of them," Elie Seidman, CEO of OkCupid, said in a statement posted to OkCupid's blog on Aug. 18.
"OkCupid has zero tolerance for racism," said Seidman. "The privilege of being in the OkCupid community does not extend to Nazis and supremacists."
Meanwhile, another matchmaking platform, Bumble, also announced that it was seeking to ban "all forms of hate," calling on its users to block and report anyone they saw expressing hate.
OkCupid and Bumble are among a list of internet firms to take strong steps against extremism after the event in Charlottesville.
Companies that offer hosting services, including GoDaddy and Google, have removed white nationalist and neo-Nazi sites.
Twitter moved to suspend the account belonging to The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist news and commentary website, whose previous website was known as Total Fascism.
Facebook added tools that allow users to report hateful messages. It also banned a range of pages with names like "Right Wing Death Squad" and "White Nationalists United."
