Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer rebuffed by Russia, China

The white supremacist, Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has temporarily retreated to the dark Web as it searches for a way to refashion itself on the open Internet after Google and GoDaddy revoked its domain registration on Monday and security firm Cloudflare severed ties with the site on Wednesday. 

After the original domain — www.dailystormer.com — was discontinued on Monday, the site's owners attempted to register a domain in both China and Russia. The Chinese domain, www.dailystormer.wang, and the url from Russia, www.dailystormer.ru, were shut down just hours after being created. The site can only be access on the dark Web with a free anonymizing browser such as Tor. Content on the dark Web is not indexed by popular search engines such as Google.

The Daily Stormer's pursuit of a widely accessible, online presence in the aftermath of a crackdown from tech companies offers a snapshot into the resourcefulness of digitally savvy hate groups, which have largely been allowed to flourish online as tech companies took a hands-off approach to the political content of these groups. That approach has changed in the aftermath of the violent neo-Nazi and white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

"White nationalists have always had a level of sophistication," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University. "White nationalists have even created their own servers and crowd funding sites as a result of their increasing digital isolation."

The website's Russian domain became defunct after Cloudflare, a network that protects websites against cyberattacks, terminated The Daily Stormer's account. In blog post on the company's website, CEO Matthew Prince said the last straw came when the team behind The Daily Stormer said Cloudflare is "one of us." The company initially was one of the few to stick with The Daily Stormer. .

“I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis,” Prince told Gizmodo. “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me.”

Representatives from Zodiac Wang Limited, a Chinese-based company that registers .wang domains, and RU-Center, which registers .ru domains, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Representatives from The Daily Stormer could not be reached for comment through their Twitter accounts, which were suspended Wednesday. 

The Daily Stormer's domain was originally hosted by GoDaddy. But after the site published a post disparaging Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed by an alleged neo-Nazi in Charlottesville over the weekend, GoDaddy dropped it as a customer, saying the post violated its terms of services agreement by inciting violence. 

Soon after, The Daily Stormer switched its domain registration to Google, which then removed the website just hours later.

Other tech companies providing services to The Daily Stormer followed suit.

Zoho, which provided email services to the website, and Sendgrid, an email marketing company, both said they would no longer serve The Daily Stormer. Both Discord and Discourse, companies that runs an open-source chatrooms used by The Daily Stormer users, said on Twitter they had kicked the site off, too.

Tech companies' rejection of any association with The Daily Stormer, which published articles grouped under the headings such as "Jewish Problem" and "Race War," and gave followers detailed instructions on what items to bring to Charlottesville, represents a stronger response from the industry on domestic hate groups.

Google, which owns YouTube, banned the site from YouTube. And Facebook confirmed to USA TODAY that it is actively removing shares of The Daily Stormer article about Heyer unless the link is shared with a caption clearly condemning the story. The company also removed The Daily Stormer's Instagram account.

Any removal from the public eye may be be short-lived. As soon as The Daily Stormer gets kicked off one platform, its founders seem to find another or build their own. They have an incentive: while operating on the dark Web offers a way to operate without the nod from a domain registration company such as Google, it won't be available to as many readers as possible.

"They don't want to hide, they want to recruit," said Linda Woolf, a psychology professor at Webster University in Missouri studying hate groups online. "They'll do whatever they can to reach people."