Hotjar decided it couldn’t claim to be committed to anti-racism and provide services to the president’s reelection efforts. Will others follow? Last week, a tech analytics company called Hotjar announced the unusual decision to block President Donald Trump and the Republican Party from using its services to promote Trump’s reelection campaign. Hotjar’s logic was remarkably straightforward: The company prides itself on standing against racial injustice, and Trump, with the support of the GOP, has said and done a lot of racist things. Trump and the Republican Party “are clearly not aligned with our values as a company, and in the spirit of living our value of working with respect, we have decided to take action” two Hotjar executives wrote in a post explaining the move. The Trump campaign was using Hotjar to optimize the user experience in its online merchandise store. Hotjar is the first software company to publicly drop the Trump campaign as a customer, according to Nandini Jammi, a marketing industry advocate who has called on companies to stop working with groups and individuals that promote hate. Most tech companies share (or at least claim to) Hotjar’s progressive values. But few are as ideologically consistent in their actions. Fearful of baseless allegations of anti-conservative bias, tech companies generally try to excuse themself of responsibility for their role in promoting hateful ideologies. They default to claims of objectivity, neutrality and an insistence that no one should want them to be the arbiter of morality. Several tech companies have even been hesitant to cut off services to violent neo-Nazis. (…) “Most tech companies already have policies against hate speech and violence, but they’re reluctant to enforce them,” Jammi told HuffPost. “Tech CEOs still tend to think of their platforms as public utilities, as if they’re just the piping running through a house. I don’t think people are buying that anymore.” Unlike public utilities, a top priority for tech companies is to profit off of the people who use their services, making it harder to claim moral distance. (Hotjar says it plans to donate the approximately $920 it made from the GOP.) Hotjar’s decision is a testament to the effectiveness of public pressure from people like Jammi, who co-founded Sleeping Giants, a group that uses social media to pressure companies to stop financially supporting the far-right through advertising revenue.
via huff: A Tech Company Cut Ties With The Trump Campaign Because It Violated Its Values