Hosting service evicts neo-Nazi website

GoDaddy gives 'Daily Stormer' 24 hours to relocate from its domain host.

By AMY SPIRO
Updated: AUGUST 15, 2017 01:57
Members of the US National Socialist Movement salute during a neo-Nazi rally in Kansas City on the 75th anniversary of the Kristallnacht attack on Jews in Germany (photo credit: DAVE KAUP / REUTERS)
Members of the US National Socialist Movement salute during a neo-Nazi rally in Kansas City on the 75th anniversary of the Kristallnacht attack on Jews in Germany
(photo credit: DAVE KAUP / REUTERS)
The neo-Nazis finally went too far.
Amid the turmoil swirling after the white supremacist rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned fatal on Saturday, web hosting company GoDaddy told neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer that it had violated its terms of service and had 24 hours to relocate.
The decision by GoDaddy was in response to a Daily Stormer post about the victim of the car-ramming on Saturday. The website called Heather Heyer, who was killed when a suspected white supremacist activist drove his car into a counterprotest, a “fat, childless 23-year-old slut.” The article went on to claim Heyer was a drain on society and “most people are glad she is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness.”
In a tweet early Monday morning, GoDaddy said it had notified the site “that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.”
Dan Race, a spokesman for GoDaddy, told The Jerusalem Post that if they don’t take any action after 24 hours “we will cancel the service.”
“Given their 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,” said Race. He added that GoDaddy does not host the website, but only the domain name.
For years now, The Daily Stormer has been posting repulsive hate messages attacking Jews, gays, blacks and just about anyone who doesn’t see the world through a white nationalist lens. The site’s section on the “Jewish Problem” regularly denies the Holocaust, calls Jews evil parasites and endorses a “final solution.”
Yet in the past, GoDaddy never saw that content as violating its terms of service. As recently as last month, the web hosting service declined to take action against the neo-Nazi site. After The Daily Stormer threatened to go after the families of CNN staffers in July, a representative for GoDaddy told The Daily Beast that the threats did not breach its terms of service.
“While we detest the sentiment of this site and the article in question, we support First Amendment rights and, similar to the principles of free speech, that sometimes means allowing such tasteless, ignorant content,” it said at the time.
GoDaddy declined to comment on what had convinced the company to finally take action this week. It also did not answer questions if other sites which utilize its domain hosting service, including other neo-Nazi blogs, would be affected.
For example, therightstuff.biz, whose domain name is also hosted by GoDaddy, posted this week that the car-ramming suspect did nothing wrong, and contemplated getting vanity plates to match the license plate of the car in celebration of the attack.
Meanwhile on Monday, The Daily Stormer was the target of a purported hack by Anonymous, an activist hacker group, which said it took offense to the site’s “putrid hate” in a blog post at the top of the page. None of the other content on the site was affected. However, Anonymous denied it had taken control of the site, suggesting that The Daily Stormer itself was merely pretending to be hacked.