Twitter dumps neo-Nazi account

SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter Incorporated has suspended the account of The Daily Stormer, a US neo-Nazi and white supremacist news and commentary website.

The San Francisco-based social networking company joined a list of other technology firms to move against The Daily Stormer, which previous published on the web as Total Fascism, in the wake of deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Daily Stormer’s account on Twitter was no longer accessible on Wednesday while Twitter declined to “comment on individual accounts”, citing its rules.

The original Dailystormer website was off-line. So was its new site, which appears to have been created with a Russian domain hosting service.

Considering itself to be a part of the so-called alternative right, or alt-right, movement, the website published on Sunday an article smearing Heather Heyer, who was killed the previous day at a Unite the Right fascist rally in Charlottesville. Participants of the rally on Friday and Saturday included white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, neoNazis and militias.

The event turned violent on Saturday, and James Fields, a 20-yearold male resident of Ohio described as a Nazi sympathiser, drove his car into a crowd of people who were protesting against the rally, killing Heyer and injuring more than a dozen of others.

In response to the article smearing Heyer, GoDaddy Incorporated, a web hosting company based in Scottsdale, Arizona, said The Daily Stormer’s website had violated the terms of service. It gave its editor, Andrew Anglin, 24 hours to locate new hosting for the site.

The site then moved to Google, but its registration with Google Domains was almost immediately cancelled by the host company.

Facebook also confirmed it had been deleting links to The Daily Stormer’s site from its social network platform.