Heather Heyer, 32, died on Saturday after a man drove his car into a group of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. Following Heyer’s death, neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer published a list of “five fat facts” — the typo is theirs and intentional — calling her a “fat, childless, 32-year-old slut” who was a “burden on society” with “no value.” GoDaddy, Daily Stormer’s domain provider, gave the site 24 hours to find somebody else to do business with, saying Daily Stormer had violated its terms of service. (During that time, a post appeared at the top of Daily Stormer claiming the site had been taken over by Anonymous. A twitter account devoted to Anonymous news claimed the group was not behind the hack — it was odd that all of the site’s content remained intact — but rather it was a stunt pulled by Daily Stormer.)
Following GoDaddy’s eviction, Daily Stormer tried to move its domain name over to Google. This didn’t work. An hour after registering, Google terminated Daily Stormer’s request, for violating its terms of service. The site’s Twitter account has also since been suspended. Facebook is also censoring Daily Stormer content, deleting posts from anyone who shared the Heyer story in seriousness. Facebook is leaving up posts with captions from people sharing the story to condemn Daily Stormer. (Worth noting, it was initially shared over 65,000 times on the platform before Facebook stepped in to intervene.) YouTube banned Daily Stormer, too.
Today, Daily Stormer tried its hand with another domain provider — an earlier attempt with a Chinese provider at dailystormer.wang failed — this one in Russia. For a brief period of time on Wednesday, the site was live at dailystormer.ru, with a domain registered via the Russian Network Information Center. “I should point out that registry is automatic, so RU-CENTER registers thousands of domains per day,” spokesperson Egor Timofeev told CNN Money. “If we figure out that the domain owner’s work doesn’t correspond to the legal system, we will act according to Russian web standard regulation.” By Wednesday afternoon, the .ru version of the site was also offline.
In what is perhaps the final nail in the coffin for Daily Stormer, Cloudflare, a service websites use to protect against DDoS attacks, cut business with the neo-Nazi site. Previously, Cloudflare had defended Daily Stormer — “a website is speech, it is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post about the site — and even provided personal information to Daily Stormer of users who complained to Cloudflare about DS’s content. (Cloudflare told ProPublica it has since changed its reporting service to keep people safe.) Turns out, there is a point where even the most vocal proponents of free speech will turn their backs on you: mocking a woman violently killed amid a sea of literal Nazis.
