Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists found a home at Parler.
Now China and Russia are stepping in.
There are reasons for that.
The Parler app was a haven for Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists - now it has been taken offline.
But extremist websites are increasingly turning to providers in Russia and China.
Hope rests on regulatory requirements under Joe Biden - even if marginalized groups are likely to continue to orientate themselves towards authoritarian states.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on January 22, 2021
.
The founder of the neo-Nazi online junk newspaper
The Daily Stormer
had a tip for Parler's operators after the app was taken offline last week: Ask China or Russia for help.
Parler - a haven for supporters of former US President Donald Trump and conspiracy theorists too extreme for Twitter and Facebook - was no longer accessible after it was taken from the app stores of Google and Apple and then from Amazon's hosting Services had been deleted: The platform had failed to contain threats and calls to violence during the riot at the US Capitol in early January.
"I want this to be 100% clear," wrote Andrew Anglin on the
Daily Stormer
shortly after Parler was banned.
"No internet company will support your freedom of expression if the media says you shouldn't have freedom of expression - except Chinese or Russian."
Both Beijing and Moscow are very adept at censoring information that they deem unacceptable.
Beijing in particular operates the most extensive and sophisticated censorship apparatus the world has ever seen.
That both seem to have become safe havens for extremist content from the West is a sign of a troubling, growing alliance between right-wing extremists and authoritarian governments.
Right-wing extremist platforms: Groups are increasingly turning to providers in China and Russia
Anglin needs to know.
His hostile website went offline after the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Anglin had used the site to celebrate the death of counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer, which caused a number of organizations, including website infrastructure provider Cloudflare, to cease their services, leaving The Daily Stormer (temporarily) offline.
Keeping a website online requires the collaboration of a long list of often invisible services, including transit providers, web hosting and content delivery networks, authoritative and recursive domain name system (DNS) providers, domain registrars , Registries and internet service providers.
The role of platforms at the top of this “tech tower” like Facebook and Twitter, which fail to moderate content, is well known.
However, only recently have some of those underlying services been forced to recognize that keeping toxic websites alive is not a neutral act.
The Daily Stormer
and other extremist, white-nationalist platforms have paved their way back to the Internet, supported by a dwindling number of hiding places: freedom of expression absolutists in the West, but also - to a decisive extent - dodgy opportunists in China and Russia.
Your ultimate goal: Websites that are not dependent on the services of mainstream web hosting and website protection companies and are therefore more difficult to take offline.
This is a path that Parler has now taken with the help of the Russian website protection provider DDoS-Guard.
Neo-Nazi platform Daily Stormer expresses support for CCP in China - call to use WeChat app
A central part of the
Daily Stormer's
strategy was to
source
its DNS service from China.
A DNS is a service that transforms the sequence of numbers that make up an IP address into reader-friendly domain names such as foreignpolicy.com (sort of a kind of telephone book for the Internet).
The DNS of the
Daily Stormer
was, as
Ars Technica
first discovered in 2019, “distributed over a large number of individual IP addresses, all of which are served from China”.
A Whois query reveals that the
domain name used
by the
Daily Stormer was
registered through Eranet International Limited, a Guangdong-based company founded in 2000 and incorporated in Hong Kong as Todaynic.com, Inc. in 2005.
The company is an accredited registrar with both the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the China Internet Network Information Center, China's chief Internet administrator.
“Finding new hosts isn't a big deal,” Anglin said in his advice to Parler, adding, “It was pretty easy for me because I've always been relatively pro-PRC [People's Republic of China], or at least not anti-PRC. “But, he emphasized, all right-wing sides who continued to criticize Beijing“ will be received much less warmly than I ”.
A look at the archives of the
Daily Stormer
confirms Anglin's claim.
He frequently writes about his support for Beijing's policy against Uighur Muslims, arguing that China has more freedom of expression than the United States.
Anglin has even advocated a Chinese occupation of the West as an alternative to alleged "Jewish rule" and called on the right to use the Chinese messaging app WeChat as a "safer" alternative to other instant messaging services.
Far-right groups: Christchurch bomber admired KP - Beijing's suppression of Uyghurs
While far-right groups often claim to be against the Chinese Communist Party, a pro-Beijing stance can be seen among
Daily Stormer
readers such as the Christchurch terrorist, an Australian supporter of white supremacy, in 2018 donated three times to the site - a year before he murdered 51 Muslim believers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The terrorist traveled to China six times between 2014 and 2015 and wrote in his manifesto that China was the nation with the political and social values closest to its own and that he admired “non-diverse” nations.
The ideological anchoring of the Chinese Communist Party in Marxism-Leninism has given way to a self-assured ethno-nationalism, especially under Xi Jinping.
The most chilling example of this attitude is Beijing's oppression and subjugation of millions of Uyghurs.
Russian Internet service providers offer
another option for extremist websites such as the
Daily Stormer
.
After initially using DNS hosted in China, the website switched to a .su address - with the top-level domain for the former Soviet Union.
Until Saturday, the Russian DDoS guard offered protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks for the hosting company VanwaTech in Washington state, which in turn provided hosting services for
The Daily Stormer
and 8kun - the forum, earlier than 8chan, which is associated with white racism, neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, multiple mass shootings, and child pornography.
After an investigation by the
Guardian
, DDoS-Guard cut the connection to VanwaTech.
Russia: Russian internet service providers as another option for extremist websites
According to the
Guardian
, DDoS-Guard “was registered as a“ limited partnership ”on November 24, 2017 by Alexey Likhachev and Evgeniy Marchenko - two Russian businessmen who still own the company - a financial structure in Scotland that allows foreign residents enables companies to be set up without extensive scrutiny ”.
The company under which DDoS-Guard has been registered is called Cognitive Cloud and has an address in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The list of DDoS Guard customers compiled by cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs, which reads like a criminal record, includes:
B. HK Leaks, a website that specializes in doxing of protesters and journalists in Hong Kong - this gathering and posting of personal information on the Internet appears to be promoted by groups with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
According to
Vice,
other customers include
the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Russian secret service FSB and, as Krebs reported, the official website of Hamas, the Palestinian group classified as a terrorist organization by the US government.
Up until now, toxic websites have only been banned from the Internet on an ad hoc basis, and usually only after a violent incident related to online activity on such websites.
And even then, a long list of service providers who make up the “technology tower” must jointly decide to take a website offline.
Each and every one of these services "could regulate online content," as Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, wrote in a blog post in which he explained his company's decision in 2017 to
stop
the
Daily Stormer from
proxy and DNS services to provide.
"The question is, which of them should do it?"
Biden government in the USA: hope for regulatory requirements
In that and another post from Cloudflare's 2019 CEO explaining why his company ended services for 8chan after a string of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, Dayton, Ohio, Poway, California, and Christchurch (New Zealand) were inspired by the forum - Prince formally begged governments to intervene and set regulatory guidelines.
Hopefully, under the new Biden administration in the United States, such regulatory requirements will be initiated.
But even if it does get that far, marginalized groups and extremists will likely continue to seek refuge with their websites in other countries such as Russia and China, where they can more easily withstand diplomatic, political and legal pressure.
Anglin from the
Daily Stormer
sees it coming: "My only advice is this," Anglin wrote recently on his website.
“Talk to the Chinese.
Maybe they don't watch your content, or maybe they support you one way or another, even if you are anti-China, because you are against the US government.
I dont know.
But this is your only chance. "
by Fergus Ryan
Fergus Ryan
is an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Center for International Cyber Policy.
This article was first published in English on January 22nd, 2021 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” - as part of a cooperation, the translation is now also available to
Merkur.de
readers
.
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