OkCupid bans white supremacist for life, asks daters to report others – Ars Technica

Dating site OkCupid made the unusual move of announcing that it had given a single member a "lifetime" ban on Thursdayand naming himin order to make a point.

"We were alerted that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was on OkCupid," the company wrote at its official Twitter account on Thursday. "Within 10 minutes, we banned him for life."

Cantwell was the subject of a Vice documentary about the white-supremacist Unite The Right marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the past weekend, where he offered numerous racist and threatening comments while acting as a march organizer and riding in a car alongside former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. ("We're not non-violent," Cantwelloffered at one point in the documentary. "We'll fucking kill these people if we fucking have to.")

In announcing this ban,OKC alsoasked its users to be vigilant about any other active members of hate groups found on the site. "If any OkCupid members come across people involved in hate groups, please report it immediately," the company wrote on its Twitter page. The tweet linked to the company's official "feedback" site.

On OkCupid, Cantwell wentby the handle "ItsChris603" where he described himself as "a professional podcaster and writer specializing in controversial political satire" who specifically sought only"white" women. His dating profile did not contain statements anywhere near as sensational as those in the Vice documentary, though in a section titled,"I spend a lot of time thinking about," Cantwell wrotethe following: "Getting married, and how to stop the Democrat party from destroying Western Civilization." (A 2015 archiveof his dating profile is different, as it containsa shout-out to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and a declaration that "I will make you laugh at things you might feel guilty laughing about, which is my favorite kind of laughter.")

Cantwell's OkCupid profiles look remarkably different fromonewritten by theSouthern Poverty Law Center, which describes him as "an unapologetic fascist who spews white nationalist propaganda with a libertarian spin" (and with many citations).

OkCupid's media relations team actively approached news outlets at the moment the company announced the ban, including Gizmodo, whichpublished a statement from OKCupid CEOElie Seidma: "We make a lot of decisions every day that are tough. Banning Christopher Cantwell was not one of them."

In that same report, Gizmodo went to the trouble of rifling through Cantwell's Internet history to find his own "dating advice for the ladies" post that revolved around his use of OkCupid; this post included a "tip" to women that simply said, "In a photo of you and a friend, I assume you are the ugly one." Cantwell has since deleted that and similarposts from his personal site.

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OkCupid bans white supremacist for life, asks daters to report others - Ars Technica