Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has found a home on the Russian internet after American tech companies refused to host it.
GoDaddy canceled the website’s registration on Monday after The Daily Stormer published a derogatory story about Heather Heyer, who was killed while protesting against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia at the weekend.
Google briefly became the registrar for the site, before it too canceled the site’s registration later on Monday for violating its terms of service.
The site, which calls itself “The World’s Most Genocidal Republican Website,” was forced into the “dark web.” That meant it could not be accessed through standard web browsers.
The original website, Dailystormer.com, was still offline on Wednesday afternoon. But the site could be accessed at Dailystormer.ru after the domain was registered with the Russian Network Information Center, or RU-CENTER.
Russia’s largest domain name registrar confirmed it had registered the site.
“I should point out that registry is automatic, so RU-CENTER registers thousands of domains per day,” spokesperson Egor Timofeev said in a statement emailed to CNNMoney.
“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,” he added.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, says the site spreads “anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, primarily through guttural hyperbole and epithet-laden stories about topics like alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime.”
Russia has recently dialed up its censorship of the internet.
The government’s media and telecommunication watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has blocked thousands of websites and maintains a long list of banned content.
The list includes websites taken down because of data protection concerns and laws prohibiting the distribution of “gay propaganda”, as well as political content the government deems “extremist.”
Roskomnadzor did not respond to CNNMoney’s request for comment.
— Kaya Yurieff contributed reporting.
