Twitter suspends neo-Nazi news website account

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 18– Twitter Inc. has suspended the account
belonging to The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist
news and commentary website.

The San Francisco-based social networking company joined a list of other
technology firms to move against The Daily Stormer, whose previous website
was known as Total Fascism, in the wake of deadly violence in
Charlottesville, Virginia. The Daily Stormer’s account on Twitter was no
longer accessible on Wednesday afternoon while Twitter declined to “comment
on individual accounts,” citing its rules. Its original website,
Dailystormer.com, was offline. So was its new site, Dailystormer.ru,
presumably with a Russian domain hosting service. Considering itself to be
a part of the so-called alternative right, or alt-right, movement, the
website published on Sunday an article smearing Heather Heyer, who was
killed the previous day at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville.

Participants of the rally on Friday and Saturday included white
supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis and militias.
The event turned violent on Saturday, and James Fields, a 20-year-old male
resident of Ohio, drove his car into a crowd of people who were protesting
against the rally, killing Heyer and injuring more than a dozen of others.
In response to the article smearing Heyer, GoDaddy Inc., a web hosting
company based in Scottsdale, Arizona, blamed on Monday the The Daily
Stormer’s website for violating the terms of service and gave its editor,
Andrew Anglin, 24 hours to locate new hosting for the site. The next day,
the site moved to Google, but its registration with Google Domains was
almost immediately canceled by the host company. Also on Wednesday,
Facebook Inc. confirmed that it had been deleting links to The Daily
Stormer’s site from its social network platform. – XINHUA