Dear Tim Cook: Hate is Not a Principle — It’s Time to Dump NRA TV
In the weeks since 17 students and educators were shot and killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, millions of Americans have stood up for gun safety and countless businesses have taken action to cut ties with the gun lobby. But there’s one strange exception: tech giants are still streaming the NRA’s propaganda via services run by Amazon, Google, Roku and Apple. Silicon Valley’s leaders take pride in being on the forefront of social justice issues — so why are they standing by the gun lobby?
The NRA’s media platform, NRA TV, is how the NRA gets its most racist, bigoted and misogynistic rhetoric into American households, and where it threatens the media, public figures and all who dare to stand up to the NRA’s radical vision of America. This content is dangerous, full stop, which is why Moms Demand Action and Everytown launched a campaign asking tech leaders to #DumpNRATV.
But despite growing pressure from consumers to stop streaming NRA TV’s hate speech, Apple CEO Tim Cook recently announced that his company won’t remove the NRA’s video channel from Apple TV’s offerings, stating that “democracy without discourse is not a democracy.” Cook seems to think streaming NRA TV is similar to providing a platform for Fox News, but it’s more like if Apple lent its platform to a racist, bigoted, misogynistic cult leader.
This isn’t about free speech, it’s about dangerous speech.
NRA TV commentators regularly promote the views of conspiracy theorists and white supremacists. Host Dana Loesch has called the mainstream media “rat-bastards of the earth,” whom she would like to see “curb stomped.” Correspondents warn about the impending threat from America’s “violent left.” They also have made sure to attack America’s teachers by calling them “lazy” and a “radical tool of government overreach” after the American Federation of Teachers called out Wells Fargo for providing loans and baking services to firearms manufacturers and the NRA.
The channel is so busy promoting hate and violence that it barely has time to cover gun-related issues. An expert on extremism who studied two months worth of NRA TV content in 2017 found that approximately only one out of every six NRA TV videos and tweets was focused on guns or gun ownership. The vast majority of its content is instead focused on the violent demonization of the NRA’s political opponents and fellow Americans.
In July 2017, an NRA TV video included such incendiary rhetoric that it was widely viewed as a call to violence and civil war — drawing criticism and outrage even from gun owners, including some of the organization’s own members. This past February, just a few days before the Parkland shooting, NRA TV featured a video of a man swinging a sledgehammer into a TV set playing clips of media commentators. Following the Parkland shooting, the channel released another video warning the media, Hollywood, athletes, and politicians that their time was “running out.”
And that’s not all. NRA TV went after YouTube, suggesting that the company only had itself to blame for the April 3rd shooting at its San Bruno headquarters, with an NRA TV host proclaiming, “YouTube making these changes where they’re going from being a platform for videos to being a publisher of videos, meaning that they are starting to censor content here and there, whatever, actually opens them up to liability and it opens them up to a lot of hatred from people around the world.”
The host is referring to Youtube’s recent decision to prohibit videos promoting the sale and assembly of firearms following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
It’s not surprising to see violence-inciting content from NRA TV. But it is surprising that tech leaders at Apple, Google, Amazon, and Roku are willing to allow this dangerous content on their streaming platforms, especially since many of the leaders of these same companies took outspoken stands on other important issues in the past, including net neutrality and marriage equality.
The inaction of these tech executives is particularly depressing in light of the recent wave of efforts by corporate America to distance itself from the NRA and address the scourge of gun violence in this country. In the aftermath of the shooting in Parkland, First National Bank of Omaha announced that it would no longer issue its NRA Visa card. Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of Alamo, Enterprise and Hertz, ended its discount program for NRA members. Symantec, the software company behind LifeLock and Norton AntiVirus, wasn’t far behind.
In March, Dick’s Sporting Guns and Walmart both announced they were raising the minimum age for gun buyers to 21, and Dick’s also decided to end sales of assault-style weapons (a move Walmart made in 2015). Citigroup announced it would bar its business customers from engaging in firearm sales without a background check and from selling bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. And just last week, Bank of America announced it will no longer finance companies that manufacture assault-style firearms for civilian use.
These companies acted because they understand that being affiliated with the NRA is bad for business. And it’s not just about the bottom line: American businesses have the responsibility to make ethical decisions about the content they provide on their platforms.
It’s time for tech leaders to acknowledge their role in helping the NRA spread divisive content that endangers our families and communities. Lives are on the line. The time for enabling the NRA’s hate speech and calls to violence has long passed. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Roku must dump NRA TV once and for all.
