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The Daily Stormer has returned under a Russian domain name

The Daily Stormer has returned under a Russian domain name

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Rally In Solidarity With The Victims Of Charlottesville Held In Minneapolis
Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Just one day after the site dropped off the web, the Daily Stormer has reappeared using a Russian domain name. The site became unreachable yesterday after GoDaddy, Google, and a string of other companies dropped the site as a client, leaving it without a registrar. Facebook also took aggressive action against the site, deleting shared versions of an article celebrating the killing of a protestor in Charlottesville.

Still, those efforts don’t seem to have been enough to keep the Daily Stormer off the web entirely. The site reappeared this morning at DailyStormer.ru, with a wildly different design and a significant number of posts apparently missing. Shortly after the takedown, a replica of the site was also set up as a Tor Hidden Service, although that address now points users back to the .ru domain.

“We’ve been given a massive amount of publicity by the media.”

“What has happened is that we’ve been given a massive amount of publicity by the media,” founder Andrew Anglin wrote in a post explaining the shift, “and we need to work on capitalizing on that to get our ideas further into the public sphere.”

Driven off Facebook, the site has also set up a community at VK, a similar network based on Russia, although they have struggled to attract a similar following. As of press time, Daily Stormer’s VK page had only 88 followers.

It’s unclear who is hosting the new version of the site. Whois records show only that the new site is being served through CloudFlare, a content delivery network that has drawn criticism for providing services to the site in the past.

It remains to be seen how long the site will survive at the new domain, and it is possible that subsequent pressure will force the site to vacate the domain in the days to come. After Charlottesville, tech providers have taken a more aggressive stance against white nationalists, with Discord, GoFundMe, and others actively denying service to neo-Nazi groups and users. Still, the Daily Stormer’s quick reappearance drives home how difficult it is to drive a site off the internet entirely, given the distributed and international nature of the web.