How One Major Internet Company Helps Serve Up Hate on the Web

ProPublica
May 4, 2017


Since it's launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the Internet.
Women are whores, blacks are inferior and a shadowy Jewish cabal is organizing a genocide against white people.
The site can count among it's readers Dylann Roof, the white teenager who slaughtered nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, and James Jackson, who fatally stabbed an elderly black man with a sword in the streets of New York earlier this year.

Traffic is up lately, too, at white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron Watch, American Renaissance and Stormfront, one of the oldest white nationalist sites on the internet.

The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by an otherwise very mainstream internet company - Cloudflare.
Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites - speeding up delivery of a site's content and protecting it from several types of attacks.
Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through it's network, and the company's mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.

The widespread use of Cloudflare's services by racist groups is not by accident.
Cloudflare has said it is not in the business of censoring websites and will not deny it's services to even the most offensive purveyors of hate.

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