The bad news: The white supremacist, hate media website Daily Stormer was back online once again this week after being shut down on Monday by GoDaddy and Google. So the site’s owner chose to bore its hole into a Russian domain. The good news: Even Russia wanted nothing to do with them. Rachel Sandler with USA Today reports:
The white supremacist, Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has temporarily retreated to the dark Web as it searches for a way to refashion itself on the open Internet after Google and GoDaddy revoked its domain registration on Monday and security firm Cloudflare severed ties with the site on Wednesday.
After the original domain — www.dailystormer.com — was discontinued on Monday, the site’s owners attempted to register a domain in both China and Russia. The Chinese domain, www.dailystormer.wang, and the url from Russia, www.dailystormer.ru, were shut down just hours after being created. The site can only be access on the dark Web with a free anonymizing browser such as Tor. Content on the dark Web is not indexed by popular search engines such as Google.
Many hate groups have been allowed to flourish, thus far, with tech companies standing back under First Amendment’s freedom of speech, but Sandler reports, “That approach has changed in the aftermath of the violent neo-Nazi and white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.”
The Daily Stormer’s domain was originally hosted by GoDaddy. But after the site published a post disparaging Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed by an alleged neo-Nazi in Charlottesville over the weekend, GoDaddy dropped it as a customer, saying the post violated its terms of services agreement by inciting violence.
The featured story included Heather Heyer’s photo with the title, “Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage incident was a Fat, Childless 32-year-old Slut.” You can view some of the screenshots captured from other stories on the Daily Stormer’s front page HERE. Warning: some images may be considered highly disturbing.
Hours after GoDaddy banned Daily Stormer, Google and other tech companies including Zoho and Sengrid followed suit removing email services. YouTube owned by Google also banned the site, and Facebook confirmed to USA TODAY that it is “actively removing shares of The Daily Stormer article about Heyer unless the link is shared with a caption clearly condemning the story.” Instagram, owned by Facebook also removed The Daily Stormer’s account. Sandler believes any removal from the public eye may be short-lived. “As soon as The Daily Stormer gets kicked off one platform, its founders seem to find another or build their own.”
Building membership and/or recruitment is reportedly the goal of Daily Stormer says Linda Woolf, a psychology professor at Webster University in Missouri. Woolf researches hate groups/organizations.
“They don’t want to hide, they want to recruit. They’ll do whatever they can to reach people.”