White supremacists have reportedly built a website that names, shames, and effectively promotes violence against interracial couples and families -- "and it's been circulated in some of the darkest corners of the internet, including in neo-Nazi Discord servers and accelerationist Telegram channels," reports VICE News. An anonymous reader shares the report: The website was created in April but was taken offline after their initial hosting provider cut ties with them. They then found a home with one of Russia's largest domain registrars, R01. VICE News contacted R01 on Tuesday to ask whether the site violated their policies. An hour later, the site was taken offline, but as of Wednesday morning it was back up. Tatiana Agafonova, a spokesperson for R01, wrote in an email that the company would "diligently render its services to customers" unless a court rules otherwise or they're contacted by law enforcement. The owner of the website shields their identity and location through Cloudflare, a U.S.-based security company that protects customers from DDoS attacks (attempts to crash a website by overwhelming it with data). VICE News contacted Cloudflare to ask how this particular website squared with their policies. They declined to comment on individual websites but directed us to their blog from February 2019, where they "address complaints about content." Their bottom line was that Cloudflare is a security company, and content moderation isn't really their responsibility.
[O]ther online extremists have gotten very good at evading tech crackdowns by employing an ever-evolving shared language of memes and euphemisms used to signpost for the same racist views. The website in question uses the same strategy, which seems to be carefully crafted in an effort to shield the owner from liability. The owner even explicitly states on the site that they do not encourage violence -- all they're doing is listing names and social media accounts as part of a database of "white women who have an interest in black men." One section is titled "toll paid," and it lists women who have been in interracial relationships, and had something horrible happen to them, like death or injury. [...]
The owner of the website claims that the "toll paid" section is intended to catalog incidents where white women are victims of black violence, and isn't an incitement. But "all the disclaimers in the world" may not be enough to protect them from a lawsuit some day, especially if someone is harassed or harmed as a result, says Subodh Chandra, a former federal prosecutor who has handled high-profile civil rights cases, including a recent case against the Daily Stormer.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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