The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi website, has less than 24 hours to find another domain provider after GoDaddy decided the site violated its terms of service for publishing an article that could “incite further violence.”
GoDaddy’s decision came after the site published a slanderous article about the death of Heather Heyer, an anti-white supremacist protester who was killed over the weekend in Charlottesville. Shortly after the article was published, many critics on Twitter — including Amy Siskind, prominent LGBTQ and women’s rights activist — called on the web hosting company to take action against The Daily Stormer.
.@GoDaddy you host The Daily Stormer – they posted this on their site. Please retweet if you think this hate should be taken down & banned. pic.twitter.com/fqTtGoTbmn
— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) August 14, 2017
A few hours later GoDaddy responded via Twitter, saying The Daily Stormer had been informed it needed to move its domain to a different provider.
We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.
— GoDaddy (@GoDaddy) August 14, 2017
While The Daily Stormer content is not hosted on GoDaddy’s servers, the company made it clear it plans to sever all ties with the website.
“If no action is taken after 24 hours, we will cancel the service,” Dan Race, a spokesperson for GoDaddy, wrote in an email statement to ThinkProgress. “Given this latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of service.”
The reason that GoDaddy chose to ban The Daily Stormer now, rather than for previous articles on the site riddled with hate speech, seems to be because of the timing of the article, which was published hours after Heyer was pronounced dead and while there was still unrest in Charlottesville.
The article — penned by The Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin — calls Heyer a “drain on society” and appears to celebrate her death. “Despite feigned outrage by the media, most people are glad she is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness,” the story reads. “A 32-year-old woman without children is a burden on society and has no value.”
The piece also dismisses the actions of James Alex Fields Jr., the driver of the car that allegedly struck and killed Heyer, as simply having “road rage.”
“Whatever you think of the driver, it is clear that his actions saved us a lot of money,” the piece reads. “The costs of the food alone to sustain a woman of this size for another 49 years would be astronomical.”
Anglin is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “neo-Nazi extremist,” infamous for the “crudity of his language and his thinking” and for being a “prolific Internet troll and serial harasser.”
Anglin has also been supportive of President Donald Trump. When the president responded to the events that occurred in Charlottesville with a milquetoast statement claiming there is violence on “many sides,” Anglin interpreted Trump’s silence on white supremacists groups to mean they have his support. He posted on The Daily Stormer that Trump’s avoidance of condemning the actions of white supremacists was “really, really good….God bless him.”
In case you're wondering if President Trump inspires neo-nazis–this is from their publication The Daily Stormer: pic.twitter.com/cT4OZv7VMP
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) August 12, 2017
UPDATE (2:20 PM):
At 10:51 AM The Daily Stormer moved its domain registration from GoDaddy to Google. Google quickly canceled the registration just after 2:00 PM.
A spokesperson for Google said: “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service.”
UPDATE (8/15/17):
After both GoDaddy and Google refused to host the domain for a white nationalist website, The Daily Stormer is currently offline.
Some visitors are greeted with a blank error messages while others receive a message, likely from the owners that reads, “We are having an outage. It’ll be a minute.” The message is accompanied by now-dead links that direct visitors to their chat room and forum on Discord, a popular gaming platform, that on Monday shut down the servers for Richard Spencer’s altright.com forum.
On Tuesday morning, however, a link for a dark web version of The Daily Stormer circulated on Twitter. According to a Vice article, the dark web version is similar to the original, with posts on current events and other topics, it just now more difficult to track. The Daily Stormer is now running as a Tor hidden service, meaning the site doesn’t rely on domain registrars like Google or GoDaddy, bypassing the roadblocks it has faced in recent days.