White supremacist site the Daily Stormer needs to find another domain provider after getting the boot from GoDaddy. In a tweet, the company said “We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.”
We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.
— GoDaddy (@GoDaddy) August 14, 2017
The tweet was made in response to one by The New Agenda founder Amy Suskind calling on GoDaddy to ban Daily Stormer for posting an obscene article about Heather Heyer, who was killed in Charlottesville on Saturday after a car allegedly driven by James Alex Fields Jr. rammed into a crowd of people. Fields has been charged with second-degree murder.
Heyer was among a group protesting the Unite the Right white supremacist rally this weekend, which the Daily Stormer helped organize and promote.
In an email to TechCrunch, a GoDaddy spokesperson said “We have informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service. If no action is taken after 24 hours, we will cancel the service. Given this 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.”
GoDaddy only provides the domain for Daily Stormer and does not host the site, which calls itself “The World’s Most Genocidal Republican Website.” While GoDaddy’s action is laudable, it’s also important to note that activists, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, began calling on GoDaddy to stop providing Daily Stormer’s domain several months ago.
GoDaddy joins Airbnb and Twilio as tech companies taking action aimed at combatting hate speech in reaction to the Unite the Right rally. Airbnb deactivated the accounts of several users who were planning to attend the event, while cloud communications platform Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson said it will add “an explicit prohibition of hate speech” in the company’s acceptable use policy this week.