More tech companies shun neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer

Last week, we reported that Google Domains and Godaddy, to big domain registrars stated that the Daily Stormer violated their terms of service. The companies also completed their threat by cancelling their hosting service.

More silicon valley firms have joined the list of tech companies shunning extremism. Social media networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, music service Spotify and security firm CloudFlare were among the companies cutting off services to hate groups or removing material that they said spread hate.

“With the potential for more rallies, we’re watching the situation closely and will take down threats of physical harm,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday.

Cloud fare specifically state

Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We’ve stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We’ve taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare’s services ever again.

Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

By Wednesday, Daily Stormer had moved to a Russia-based internet domain, with an address ending in .ru. Later in the day, though, the site was no longer accessible at that address. Ru-Center, a private Moscow-based domain registrar, told RFE/RL on August 17 that the company received an official letter from Roskomnadzor requesting that the company look into possibly suspending the domain Dailystormer.ru.

Ru-Center spokesman Yegor Timofeyev told RFE/RL in an e-mail that Roskomnadzor’s letter asked the company “to look into [the] possibility of register suspension due to extremist content of this domain.”

“So we decided to suspend [the] domain Dailystormer.ru,” he said.

Reddit this week eliminated one of its discussion communities that supported the Unite the Right rally, saying that the company would ban users who incite violence.

On Monday Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted that, “We’ve seen the terror of white supremacy & racist violence before. It’s a moral issue – an affront to America. We must all stand against it”

We’ve seen the terror of white supremacy & racist violence before. It’s a moral issue – an affront to America. We must all stand against it

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) August 14, 2017

Spotify, based in Sweden, said it was in the process of removing musical acts from its streaming service that had been flagged as racist “hate bands” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“Illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us,” the company said in a statement, adding that record companies should also be held responsible.

Another white supremacist group, Vanguard America, was yanked offline by WordPress after its members rallied in Charlottesville. India-based Zoho also said that the Daily Stormer’s access to their productivity services has been terminated.

We believe that The Daily Stormer has violated Zoho’s Terms of Service, so its access to Zoho’s services has been terminated. (2/2)

— Zoho (@zoho) August 14, 2017

One of the largest crowdfunding sites, GoFundMe, told Reuters that it shut down several campaigns to raise money for the man accused of driving a car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the rally, killing one and injuring many.

“Those campaigns did not raise any money and they were immediately removed,” a spokesman told the outlet.

Kickstarter, meanwhile, said it hadn’t seen any fundraisers for the suspect but had similar policies banning hate speech and the promotion of violence.