GoDaddy pulled white nationalist Richard Spencer’s ‘alt-right’ site offline

Domain registrar GoDaddy has taken down white nationalist Richard Spencer’s site Altright.com, saying the site “crossed the line” in promoting violence. BuzzFeed reported the news yesterday, noting that Spencer had also been kicked off Facebook a few weeks earlier. Altright.com is currently offline, and GoDaddy told BuzzFeed that Spencer had 48 hours to transfer to a new registrar.

When a site “crosses over to promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in specific acts of violence against any person, we will take action,” a GoDaddy spokesperson said. “It is our determination that altright.com crossed the line and encouraged and promoted violence in a direct and threatening manner.” Spencer told BuzzFeed that he was “working on solving the problem ... in a permanent way.”

Altright.com avoided trouble for longer than some other sites associated with the “alt-right,” a term Spencer is credited with coining. Many members of the alt-right and far right were caught up in a crackdown after last year’s deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The more overtly provocative Daily Stormer was kicked off a string of registrars in mid-2017, for instance, moving to a dark web domain while seeking a permanent haven. (It’s currently with Hong Kong registrar Eranet.)

Spencer has also had trouble finding avenues for fundraising. Hatreon, a far-right-friendly Patreon alternative where he once took donations, has had pledging disabled since February. Spencer recently turned to crowdfunding sites MakerSupport and Funded Justice to help him fight a civil lawsuit over Charlottesville. But MakerSupport’s payment processor apparently disabled payouts in April, and Spencer himself was recently kicked off WePay, which he said had been processing payments for his Funded Justice campaign.

Spencer still has a web presence, though: the page for his National Policy Institute organization, apparently registered through Tucows, has been seemingly unaffected.