Twitter suspends neo-Nazi news website account

Twitter has suspended the account of The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist news and commentary website.

The San Francisco-based social networking giant joined a list of other technology firms to move against The Daily Stormer, whose previous website was known as Total Fascism, in the wake of deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Daily Stormer's account was no longer accessible on Wednesday afternoon while Twitter declined to "comment on individual accounts", citing its rules.

Its original website, Dailystormer.com, was offline. So was its new site, Dailystormer.ru, presumably 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 the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Participants of the rally included white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis and militias.

The event turned violent after James Fields, a 20-year-old male resident of Ohio, 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 Inc., a web hosting company on Monday blamed The Daily Stormer's website for violating the terms of service and gave its editor, Andrew Anglin, 24 hours to locate new hosting for the site.

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

Also on Wednesday, Facebook Inc. confirmed that it had been deleting links to The Daily Stormer's site from its social network platform.

--IANS

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