Shopify продолжает размещать магазин расистской группы «Доминион», продвигающей массовые депортации

If you’ve ever wanted a T-shirt, hoodie or baseball cap representing a racist Canadian group pushing for mass deportations, your purchase is just a few clicks away — all thanks to the e-commerce giant Shopify. The Dominion Society of Canada is a group that advocates for an extreme far-right policy known as “remigration.” They propose to remove up to nine million people — as much as 21 per cent of Canada’s current population — by deporting immigrants as well as revoking birthright citizenship. They’re also selling hoodies and T-shirts in a shop using the e-commerce platform Shopify. Shopify, one of Canada’s largest companies by market capitalization, provides the infrastructure for online retailers to reach their customers. The business model has made its CEO one of the richest people in the country — but it hasn’t been without controversy, largely due to the company’s decisions to power online stores belonging to some questionable characters. We don’t know how much (if anything) the Dominion Society has made off the site, though several members can be seen wearing the group’s gear in footage posted online. Shopify takes a cut of each sale, between 2.5 and 2.9 per cent, plus a 30-cent credit card processing fee, meaning the Canadian company could be profiting from merchandise that normalizes and funds a racist group. The Tyee contacted Shopify for comment about the services it provides to the Dominion Society. In response, a spokesperson explained that Shopify is “an infrastructure provider, not the arbiter of what people can buy and sell, and we don't remove merchants over objections to their worldview.” “Every merchant on Shopify is required to follow the law where they do business, and if they break it we take action up to and including termination,” the Shopify spokesperson said. At the time this story was published, Shopify continued to power the Dominion Society merchandise store. This is just the latest example of what extremism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam called Shopify’s “relationship to hate content,” which he said “has fluctuated for several years now.” As its executives, particularly Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, are increasingly trying to shape Canadian public conversations and policies, it’s raising questions about what the men behind one of Canada’s largest companies stand for — and when they’re willing to sacrifice profit for public good. Shopify’s history of failing to stop hate speech Shopify’s CEO first felt the sting of a major public backlash in 2017, when people noticed Shopify was powering the online store belonging to the extreme right-wing U.S. outlet Breitbart. Lütke resisted the backlash with a post on the blogging website Medium, which he titled “In Support of Free Speech.” While the post has since been deleted, the page was archived before it was scrubbed from the site. “To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce. When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one,” Lütke wrote. “But who gets to define that moral code? Where would it begin and end? Who gets to decide what can be sold and what can’t? If we start blocking out voices, we would fall short of our goals as a company to make commerce better for everyone. Instead, we would have a biased and diminished platform.” Lütke continued his argument justifying his decision to continue providing services to the extreme right-wing website. “We do not, and will not, refuse the Shopify service to anyone based on their political views, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. Doing so could set a dangerous precedent of exclusion,” he wrote. Breitbart still has a bare-bones version of its store online today, and it’s still powered by Shopify. A year after the Breitbart controversy, however, the Shopify CEO briefly appeared to waver in his free-speech commitment for vendors. Lütke posted an update to his previous “In Support of Free Speech” post, announcing that “solely deferring to the law, in this age of political gridlock, is too idealistic and functionally unworkable on the fast-moving internet.” “Some of those issues, such as hateful content, remain legally undefined. Others are legally addressed for a physical world, but pose different and more complicated risks on the internet. So we have found ourselves in a position of having to make our own decisions on some of these issues. And along the way we had to accept that neutrality is not a possibility,” he wrote. “We addressed this vacuum by creating a carefully crafted Acceptable Use Policy which allows space for all types of products, even the ones that we disagree with, but not for the kind of products intended to harm.” It wasn’t long before that policy was put into action. In 2018, facing pressure from activists, the e-commerce company banned some right-wing groups from using its merchant services. That included the Proud Boys, which would be listed as a terrorist organization in Canada just three years later. Shopify found itself in the news again in 2021 when, shortly after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in Washington, D.C., the e-commerce giant said it had removed sites affiliated with U.S. President Donald Trump. However, it didn’t take long for the public to notice that Shopify had continued to provide services to many other unsavoury shops with links to the attack on the Capitol. The New York Times reported that Shopify monetized shops selling merchandise with phrases such as “MAGA Civil War” and featuring nods to the conspiracy theory QAnon. Shopify ended its relationship with one website, RageOn, the following month after warning the store against selling “hateful” clothes that featured Nazi, QAnon and Proud Boys imagery. RageOn requested an injunction to keep its store alive, but that was quashed in court. Behind closed doors, Shopify had also been grappling with how to “hold the tension” of employees taking issue with some of the vendors it monetized, going so far as to send an internal memo to employees titled “Why it might be hard for you to work for Shopify.” According to a leaked copy of the September 2020 memo, Shopify employees were told that there will be a “wide mix of merchants, some who we celebrate and amplify, and others we may personally disagree with, even vehemently.” Staff were warned that, depending on how they felt about the company’s stance, Shopify might not be the right fit for them. “At Shopify, we often talk about the natural tension between opposing ideas that may need to co-exist. Not everyone will feel comfortable with this tension. This is a hard truth,” it read. “We want to be clear on our position because we need everyone at Shopify to look inward and decide whether this is a tension you can hold. If itʼs not, letʼs talk about whether Shopify is a place where you can continue to feel engaged.” While Shopify had, between 2018 and 2021, taken some action to address vendors using its services to sell hateful merchandise, the e-commerce giant’s experiment in actually addressing the issue would end one year later. A key turning point was in late 2022, when an anti-LGBTQ social media influencer known as Libs of TikTok set up a store selling products plastered with allegations of “grooming” children. At the time, Shopify affirmed it had no intention of severing ties with the vendor, even as its acceptable-use policy explicitly barred users from promoting or condoning “hate or violence” against “people based on... gender” and “sexual orientation,” among other categories. Despite this, a spokesperson for Shopify said, “this merchant is not currently in violation of Shopify’s Acceptable Use Policy.” In the ensuing months, it became clear that Shopify powered many other stores that arguably violated this policy. This included websites selling Nazi memorabilia, as well as shirts alluding to election denial, mocking LGBTQ+ folks and winking at COVID-19 conspiracies. Then, in late 2024, Shopify was at it again. This time, it was powering Alex Jones’ newest store, enabling the company to take a cut from Jones’ profits even as courts decided he owed the families of the Sandy Hook mass shooting victims nearly $1.5 billion. “During the trial, we proved that Alex Jones made millions by lying about the Sandy Hook families we represent. Now, Shopify has offered him a new platform so he can hide money from the families he spent years defaming,” Christopher Mattei, a lawyer representing the Sandy Hook families, said in a statement at the time. “It is bad enough that Shopify would partner with a man who continues to spread lies and hate every day, but it is particularly egregious that it would abet Jones’ obvious effort to evade his debts to the Sandy Hook families,” Mattei said. It was while working on that story in November 2024 that something else became apparent to me. After years of grappling with when to enforce its acceptable-use policy that barred vendors from engaging in “hateful content,” Shopify had finally taken action. Sometime after March 2024, Shopify had removed its prohibition against hateful content altogether. That was the state of Shopify’s rules when, in February 2025, the e-commerce company was in the headlines again. This time, rapper Kanye West had aired a Super Bowl ad for his store. When users visited the website, powered by Shopify, they saw he was selling swastika T-shirts. Shopify removed the store — but not for the reason you might think. It no longer prohibited hateful content, after all. In leaked internal messages, Shopify’s then-COO, Kaz Nejatian, had said the acceptable-use policy team was “looking at this and will make the call based on how our platform rules work.” “If they choose to keep him up, it will not be because we approve of this. If they bring him down, it will not be because we hate the pressure. We provide internet infra,” he wrote. It was Shopify’s general counsel at the time, Jess Hertz, who explained the real reason for the swastika T-shirt store’s removal. “Hey team — this store has now been shut down because the merchant did not engage in authentic commerce. This wasn’t real commerce — it was a stunt, not a good faith attempt to make money. This brought with it a real risk for fraud. And therefore the store has been closed,” she said. Hertz added the product was “vile, disgusting, and inexcusable. Obviously everyone agrees with that. But opinion doesn’t factor in here.” No, opinion no longer factors in at Shopify, which perhaps helps to explain why, today, it’s powering the merchandise store for a group advocating mass deportations in Canada. The impact of powering a racist store Amarasingam said there are “two issues” with Shopify powering the Dominion Society of Canada’s online store. “The first is of course the financial part, but we have no idea how much money this kind of merch is bringing in. But, Shopify is providing the commercial infrastructure that makes those transactions possible,” he said. While Shopify’s acceptable-use policy has been blunted, confusingly, the Shop app (another Shopify product) has the older version of the policy published as its acceptable-use policy — and that includes the prohibition against hateful content. The Shop app, meanwhile, also sells the Dominion Society’s merchandise. “Their own policy states that they don't allow ‘hateful content’ on their shop, so they should absolutely have to answer to why Remigration stickers are OK. The Dominion Society openly calls for the remigration (fancy word for ethnic cleansing) of millions of Canadians on their website, so it's not exactly subtle,” Amarasingam said via email. Amarasingam and other researchers use the term “ethnic cleansing” to talk about the white nationalist goal of mass deportations, or “remigration,” because these groups are focused on expelling people who are not of European descent. Beyond the question of financing, however, the second issue this merch store raises is that of “normalization.” “Shirts, hats, flags and stickers create a collective identity, make supporters visible to one another, and can make an exclusionary political project look almost like a lifestyle brand. It should be obvious why that's dangerous. There is a fairly substantial literature on the far right showing that commercialization can play precisely this normalizing and community-building role,” Amarasingam said. Daniel Tyrie, the head of the Dominion Society, has previously appeared in an X Spaces call with Alex Vriend, vice-president of the racist group Second Sons. Vriend has also posted his membership card for the Dominion Society, encouraging others to join. Researchers who study the far right have described the Dominion Society as a sort of “political wing” within a growing white nationalist movement in Canada. Second Sons, meanwhile, is a more militant group. “Both (the white nationalist active club) Second Sons and the Dominion Society are trying to move the idea of remigration into mainstream Canadian politics, and this kind of commercialization and branding is a very important part of that project,” Amarasingam said. Why do we care what a tech broligarch does? Beyond powering hateful stores, the executives from Shopify have also increasingly attempted to influence Canadian political opinion and policy — making their mindset towards hateful content all the more important. Many Canadians became aware of the Shopify CEO’s odd ideologies after he publicly mused, just weeks ago, about disenfranchising the poor and pensioners. But Lütke had ideas about shaping Canadian politics long before he posted about disenfranchising millions. In 2024, the Shopify CEO agreed that Canada needs its own “DOGE,” or Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s project to slash U.S. government spending that instead didn’t save much of anything and cut funding to life-saving aid. Those cuts are projected to cause over 780,000 deaths. While his comment about DOGE came before its disastrous impacts, just last month Lütke called Musk “the best entrepreneur that ever was.” He’s posted at length about “woke.” He’s railed against “socialists.” He’s even shared the same infographics as Musk that suggest they aren’t far right — it’s everyone else who has changed. Lütke is also, notably, one of the men behind Build Canada, a tech-bro-backed effort to influence Canadian politics. It started as a WhatsApp group chat featuring several Shopify executives, including Lütke, where they’d pontificate about the direction they thought Canadian policy should be heading. They called that group chat “Build Canada,” and eventually they launched it as a real organization in the hopes of influencing Canadian policy. On the website, a bunch of primarily middle-aged men who are ultra-wealthy get to publish their ideas for potential policies and other “builders” can endorse their ideas. The ultra-wealthy who are spending to support this effort to sway public policy appear to be getting a good return on their investment. As The Tyee has documented in a series it published on this issue, about 20 of the policies that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has introduced bear a striking similarity to suggestions from the Build Canada website. In fact, a spokesperson for Build Canada told Taylor Noakes at DeSmog that Carney’s office “has reached out to Build Canada on occasion to ask about our memos.” Meanwhile, according to documents obtained through a freedom of information request, Carney met with Lütke in January. The document, which was first reported by independent journalist Dean Beeby, contains massive redactions but states that Carney “sought input from Shopify” on how to improve a tax credit. Not only that, but Lütke isn’t the only one-time Shopify executive with sway over the public conversation. Kaz Nejatian, who is no longer at Shopify but was a longtime top executive at the company, is married to Candice Malcolm — a founder of one of Canada’s most prominent right-wing media outlets, Juno News. He helped her launch Juno News’ predecessor, True North, and Malcolm told PressProgress reporter Luke LeBrun in 2024 that she and Nejatian were “one of the largest donors to True North.” Juno News, meanwhile, has repeatedly platformed Tyrie, the executive director of the Dominion Society. The outlet has published multiple op-eds written by Tyrie, and Malcolm has invited him onto her show for a one-on-one interview. When former Alberta premier Jason Kenney took issue with the ideas Tyrie espoused on Juno News, calling Tyrie “a racist,” Malcolm pushed back. “It isn’t racist to want to end mass migration,” she responded, massively downplaying what the concept of “remigration” actually calls for. “It isn’t racist to define what it means to be Canadian. And it isn’t racist to say that those who don’t belong in Canada should be asked to leave.” For her husband’s former colleagues at Shopify, there appears to be a different calculation at work. It doesn’t matter whether the Dominion Society is racist or not — provided its store is “a good faith attempt to make money.” Read more: Politics, Science + Tech