The Daily Stormer, the white supremacist website that recently ran a story denigrating Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer, was dumped by Google and GoDaddy, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally down and out. The site is slithering off to the dark web, a peer-to-peer alternative to traditional web hosting where much of the internet’s content lives.
The white supremacist site is home to all kinds of unfortunate stories, but it finally crossed the line for Google and GoDaddy after the Daily Stormer denigrated Heather Heyer, who was murdered at Unite the Right in Charlottesville, allegedly by James Fields Jr., when he slammed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protestors. After GoDaddy gave the Daily Stormer the boot, it moved to Google, only to get unplugged again an hour later.
During the outages, readers were told to go to the Daily Stormer Discord server — Discord being a chat service often used by gamers. But Discord started cracking down on racist and hate-based content, too. According to Motherboard, the link to the Daily Stormer chatroom didn’t appear to be working any more as of Monday, suggesting that Discord might have closed up that venue as well.
That left only one real option for where the Daily Stormer could go, and that was a deep dive into the dark web. By Tuesday, links were getting passed around to the site’s new home. It’s not certain if the Daily Stormer will eventually return to standard web browsers. Its also unknown if the majority of the site’s readers will bother downloading the special TOR browser needed to access the dark web. This new state of affairs does mean that the Daily Stormer will no longer be beholden to terms of service. But that also means that the core group of loyal users who followed the site into the dark web will be operating in greater secrecy than ever. Who knows what could come of that freedom from the public eye?
(Via Motherboard)