Silicon Valley joined a swelling backlash against neo-Nazi groups in the United States on Wednesday, with more technology companies removing white supremacist groups from their services in response to the violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a man plowed a car into a crowd protesting a white nationalist gathering, killing a 32-year-old woman and injured 19 others. Cloudflare, which protects some 6 million websites from denial-of-service attacks and hacking, dropped its coverage of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer on Wednesday. The site, which helped organize the rally in Charlottesville, takes its name from Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda newspaper published in Germany during World War II. "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet," Cloudflare founder and Chief Executive Matthew Prince said in an email to employees. "The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. Like a lot of people, we've felt angry at these hateful people for a long time." Access to the Daily Stormer has been sporadic since Monday, when Google canceled its domain name registration, making its IP address nearly impossible for internet users to locate. The site had moved its registration to Google after GoDaddy tweeted late Sunday night that it had given the Daily Stormer 24 hours to move its domain to another provider. Google then yanked the address as well, saying the group had violated its terms of service. The site briefly reappeared Wednesday with a Russian domain name and registration and a dubious top story, making the unsupported claim that U.S. President Donald Trump had called Russian President Vladimir Putin to get the site restored. The story presented no evidence that either Trump or Putin had any involvement in the move, and Trump has no known links to the site. LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, suspended a page devoted to Daily Stormer and another page belonging to a man associated with the site, Andrew Auernheimer. LinkedIn declined to comment. Twitter suspended accounts linked to the Daily Stormer on Wednesday. The company said it would not discuss individual accounts, but at least three accounts known to be affiliated with the Daily Stormer led to pages saying "account suspended." The social network prohibits violent threats, harassment and hateful conduct and "will take action on accounts violating those policies," the company said in a statement. Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin said on a social network used by many of his supporters, Gab, that his site would be back soon. "The Cloudflare betrayal adds another layer of super complexity. But we got this," he said. He could not immediately be reached for further comment. "Clearly, the powers that be believe that they have the ability to simply kick me off the internet," Anglin complained to the Associated Press in an email. He said he has been "effectively been completely banned from the internet." Anglin said he was struggling to find a domain registry service with terms of service allowing for the content he produces. "I have been kicked off of four of them so far, and many of them contain explicit references to 'hate speech' in their [terms of service]. Others would be incapable of managing the [denial-of-service] attacks," Anglin wrote, expressing frustration with ICANN, the international nonprofit that authorizes domain-name registrars. "If they don't have a single registrar willing to host me, then they have effectively banned me from registering a domain," he said. Anglin had been keeping up his inflammatory statements through the Russian domain, mocking Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed when a man known for praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler rammed his car into a crowd of demonstrators in Charlottesville on Saturday. The original story called her, among many other things, "the definition of uselessness." Meanwhile, Facebook, which explicitly prohibits hate speech, has taken down several pages from Facebook and Instagram in recent days that it said were associated with hate speech or hate organizations. It also took down the event page that was used to promote and organize the "Unite the Right" rally. "With the potential for more rallies, we're watching the situation closely and will take down threats of physical harm," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday. Facebook also said it had removed accounts belonging to Chris Cantwell, a web commentator who has described himself as a white nationalist and who said on his site that he had attended the Charlottesville rally. Cantwell's YouTube account also appeared to have been terminated. Cantwell could not immediately be reached for comment. Reddit this week eliminated one of its discussion communities that supported the Unite the Right rally, saying that the company would ban users who incite violence. The company says it has more than 250 million users. Sweden-based Spotify said it was in the process of removing musical acts from its streaming service that had been flagged as racist "hate bands" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us," the company said in a statement, adding that record companies should also be held responsible. Tech companies have taken down violent propaganda from Islamic State and other militant groups in the past, in part in response to government pressure. But most internet companies have traditionally tried to steer clear of making judgments about content except in cases of illegal activity. The wave of internet crackdowns against white nationalists and neo-Nazis reflects a rapidly changing mindset among Silicon Valley firms on how far they are willing to go to police hate speech. The decision remains controversial among tech executives, however. Cloudflare's Prince said in an interview that despite his decision, he was conflicted, because it could become harder to resist pressure from governments to censor. "You don't have to play this game too many moves out to see how risky this is going to be," Prince said. "'What about this site? What about this site-'" Only the biggest companies will be able to navigate the varying laws in different countries, he said. "We've lost a lot of the fight for a free and open internet," he said. Cloudflare is well known for defending even the most distasteful websites, and its services are essential to the functioning of such websites.
