"We decided to take action" - This Maltese tech company just removed Trump off its online platform
A Maltese tech company has just thrown US President Donald Trump off its platform after it realised the Trump-Pence campaign was using it on an online merchandise shop.
Hotjar's founder and CEO David Darmanin shared a post on Facebook that linked to a company blog post where they shared that they didn't want to contribute and fuel Trump's "racist and hateful" speech that promotes "racism, division, and discrimination."
"This month we became aware that the Trump-Pence campaign was using Hotjar on their merchandise website. So we decided to take action," David said in a personal post on Facebook. "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere," he says, quoting Elie Wiesel.
“Upon further investigation, we found that the Hotjar account, which is managed by the Republican National Committee, also includes other GOP-related websites,” the blog post reads.
"The campaign and the Republican party today stand behind a candidate who has made statements that promote racism, division, and discrimination. Therefore, we believe that the values displayed by this organization as a customer of Hotjar 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," the blog post reads.
“We generally don’t disclose publicly any information about accounts we terminate, but in this case we feel we owe it to our community to explain where we stand in such a polarizing time. We also want to take the opportunity to invite other tech companies to honour their values and take a firm stance against hate and racism.”
The company has also shared that it will be making a hefty donation to combat racism. "In living that value, we are sharing with you, our community, that we have earned €780.00 in revenue so far from the Hotjar account in question, and will put that money to good use: We will donate the full €780.00 we earned, plus an additional €50,000 (roughly $59,000) of our own, to fight racism and injustice."
They deserve a massive round of applause!