The conservative Canadian website, The Rebel—also known as Rebel Media—had its domain shut down today. The “alt-media” website previously offered a platform to prominent voices on the right including Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes and right-wing activist and journalist Lauren Southern.
Speaking to Reuters today, The Rebel founder Ezra Levant said that its domain provider disabled its internet registration, making the site completely inaccessible to many users around the world. The site is said to be “scrambling” to restore services to its platform using a different domain provider.
The move to disable The Rebel’s domain comes after Silicon Valley firms like GoDaddy Inc. and Google disabled the domain for neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, forcing the website offline. Cloudflare, which hosts caches of websites, also terminated their relationship with the website for its political content. The Daily Stormer was also denied hosting by a Russian service provider following an attempt to relocate the domain
In a related move, Mailchimp and Eventbrite canceled Milo Yiannopoulos’ accounts for supposedly violating the platforms’ terms of service.
Levant refused to identify the domain provider that hosts The Rebel, but told Reuters that the website was given 24 hours’ notice to relocate the domain. He says he was not provided with any explanation for the termination.
“If this was a political censorship decision, it is terrifying – like a phone company telling you it is cancelling your phone number on 24 hours’ notice because it doesn’t like your conversations,” Levant said, adding that the website was now inaccessible to “half of the world.”
The Rebel has come under fire from a former contributor of the website, Caolan Robertson, who claimed in a video that Levant offered him “hush money” to remain silent about the company’s allegedly unethical practices.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.