Dems wrangle over breaking up Big Tech at debate
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday pressed the State Department to designate three white supremacist groups as foreign terrorist organizations, arguing that reclassification could help the U.S. seriously confront the escalating crisis of white extremist violence.
In a letter led by Rep. Max Rose (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee’s counterterrorism subpanel, the 39 lawmakers asked the State Department why they have not placed Ukraine’s Azov Batalion, Finland’s Nordic Resistance movement or the United Kingdom’s National Action on the U.S. list of “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs).
“Today, if an American citizen swears allegiance to the Islamic State (or another Foreign Terrorist Organization on the list) and spreads their message of terror, there are several resources available to the federal government to counter the threat,” their letter reads.
“However, if that same American citizen swears allegiance to a violent white supremacist extremist group based overseas and spreads their message of terror, the Federal government does not have access to the same tools,” it continues.
Removing neo-Nazis online: In a phone interview with The Hill, Rose said that designating more neo-Nazi groups as FTOs could help social media companies commit to driving them off the platform with the endorsement of the government.
“Right now, if you look at the way in which [the social media companies] measure their ability to remove terrorist content from their platforms, they are looking at the FTO list,” Rose said. “So for us to put this on that list, I think takes a bold step forward in expanding what is expected of them.”
Shootings in Poway, Calif., and El Paso, Texas, over the past several months have also been perpetrated by extremists with anti-immigrant views, which they cultivated online.
Rose called the letter a “first step” to dedicating the full breadth of government and private sector resources toward combatting the rise of white extremism.
