Unless you’re a neo-Nazi, you probably haven’t heard of the website The Daily Stormer — until now, that is.
The website, which peddled racist, hate-filled stories and promoted the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended in violence, will no longer be hosted by GoDaddy, NPR reports. GoDaddy delivered a 24-hour notice of removal after the site published a story mocking Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old anti-neo-Nazi protester killed by James Alex Fields Jr., a Nazi sympathizer who drove his car into the crowd of protesters over the weekend.
The Daily Stormer attempted to fool followers into thinking hackers from the activist group Anonymous are behind its removal, but according to Anonymous’s primary news source, Your Anon News on Twitter, the group has no involvement and the claim was likely a ploy crafted by The Daily Stormer.
Of course, perceptive readers probably could have figured that out for themselves. In the Daily Stormer blog post pinning Anonymous as the culprits, the site lists a 24-hour time limit on the threat, which is the same amount of time GoDaddy gave them to find a new host. And as Your Anon News said in a response to its own tweet, “We find claim that it took a ‘UNITED FORCE OF ELITE HACKERS’ to hack a CMS run by amateurs incredibly amusing.”
There’s also the tweet directly from GoDaddy announcing the site’s removal. Late Sunday night, it came in response to a tweet calling for The Daily Stormer’s removal that got shared nearly 9,000 times.
The Daily Stormer quickly switched over to Google’s domain hosting service, according to CNBC. But they haven’t luck there, either; it reportedly took only three hours for Google to give the site the boot. This morning, the company released the following statement: “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service.” For the time being, it appears that neo-Nazis will have to go elsewhere for hateful rhetoric.
The Charlottesville rally proved to be sickening and frustrating in a number of ways. Yet writer Audra Williams managed to sum it all up in a tweet: “155 people were arrested in Ferguson. 4 people were arrested in Charlottesville.” According to CBS News, only 3 people have been arrested in connection to the bloodshed in Charlottesville as of Saturday.
