Tech

Neo-Nazi Site Daily Stormer Stripped Of Cyber Protections

[Shutterstock - iunewind]

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Rob Shimshock Education Reporter
Font Size:

A major CEO stripped neo-Nazi outlet The Daily Stormer of his company’s cyber protections Tuesday, saying in an internal staff email that the neo-Nazi outlet’s staff consisted of “a**holes and [he’d] had enough.”

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, explained the company’s decision to violate its own content-neutral policy by refusing to do business with the site in a staff-wide email, according to Gizmodo. Publicly the CEO said “the tipping point” came when the neo-Nazi site suggested Cloudflare embraced the site’s ideology, but he elaborated in his email to staff that the “arbitrary” decision was the result of a bad mood.

“We’ve stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites,” Prince wrote in the email to his staff. “My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are a**holes and I’d had enough.”

“Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. … I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet,” he wrote.

Cloudflare’s decision exposes The Daily Stormer to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by cyber attackers, whom Prince allege contacted Cloudfare, telling the company to stop protecting the site so that they could attack it. Cyber attackers execute DDoS attacks by flooding a target with traffic via multiple systems to deny it service.

Prince insisted that his decision would “not set a precedent,” but explained that “the tipping point” came when The Daily Stormer labeled Cloudflare “one of them.” “That is the opposite of everything we believe,” he said.

The CEO wants to start a dialogue concerning whether browsers, social media networks, or registrars should have the responsibility of content-policing.

Follow Rob Shimshock on Twitter

Connect with Rob Shimshock on Facebook

Send tips to rob@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.