A man wearing a "Trump 2020" sweatshirt uses his mobile phone during a "Stop the Steal" protest outside Milwaukee Central Count the day after Milwaukee County finished counting absentee ballots
Credit: BING GUAN/Reuters
A former Pampers nappy executive has transformed his small web hosting company into a safe harbour for websites said to be enabling the spread far-right extremism and carrying Neo-Nazi content.
Rob Monster has become a key figure in the far-right’s battle to stay online, in spite of de-platformings by key companies controlling the internet’s underlying infrastructure.
Monster’s domain registrar and web hosting company Epik, which describes itself as "the Swiss Bank of Domains", has helped resurrect a series of sites tied to far-right extremism after they were ostracised by mainstream providers such as Amazon or GoDaddy.
The "free speech" social media network Parler emerged as the latest website to benefit from Epik’s services, registering its domain with the company last week, although Epik said the companies had not been in direct contact. Neither Parler nor Epik responded to multiple interview requests.
Parler is now back online after it was cut off by its web hosting provider Amazon Web Services in the aftermath of the January 6 riots in Washington D.C. Amazon said the site was not able to keep calls for violence off its platform, according to a letter sent to Parler to explain its decision.
By enlisting Epik as it’s domain registrar, Parler joins the ranks of other de-platformed websites also seeking online refuge in the services of Monster’s firm.
Parler follows a well-trodden path. Social network Gab, video site Bitchute and conspiracy website InfoWars all turned to Epik after they suffered de-platformings by payment providers or web hosting platforms who objected the content their sites carried.
In a 2019 report, US civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) described Epik as "cornering the market on websites where hate speech is thriving."
"Every time these sites are de-platformed, Rob Monster swoops in as a last resort," says Michael Hayden, spokesperson for SPLC.
"It seems to be a repeated pattern and what’s interesting is Epik is not really known for anything else. It’s a very small company, it doesn’t necessarily have much to distinguish itself outside of its connection to hate sites."
Parler downloads surged as Twitter banned Trump
When a gunman killed 11 people worshipping inside a Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018, blame for the deadliest attack on Jews in American history was directed at Gab – the social media network the man used to blast antisemitic content at his followers.
After the extreme content on the site came under scrutiny, Gab was cut off by its hosting provider, GoDaddy.
The site spent one week wandering the digital wilderness before Epik helped resurrect it and bring it back online. In a statement posted to Epik’s blog, Monster said he did not take the decision to accept Gab’s name domain registration lightly.
Monster defended Gab’s decision "to not only tolerate but to welcome competing views", while also urging the company to keep content "within the bounds of the law" – a point he reinforced by posting a YouTube clip from Spiderman where Peter Parker is told "with great power there must also come great responsibility".
But like many of the CEOs Monster is now associated with, his comments veer between free speech protectionism and implying support for the type of content his clients carry.
According to an investigation by the Huffington Post, Monster used his Gab profile to suggest in 2018 that "having a Jewish person on Epik’s board may be somewhat helping with keeping certain forces at bay". The comment has since been taken down. The two Jewish members of Epik’s board, Tal Moore and Braden Pollock, had both left by summer 2020 stating ideological differences.
What is Gab? | The alt-right’s answer to Twitter
Although Parler might have found some stability with Epik for now, Monster does have limits — even if the bar is high.
The company de-platformed the online forum 8chan after ties emerged between the platform and a shooter who killed 23 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas in 2019.
"In cases whereby Epik identifies a particular publisher as being under-equipped to properly enforce its own Terms of Service, Epik reserves the right to deny service," the company said in a statement regarding the decision in August 2019.
In another statement released in January, the company said it has "helped identify millions of threads of harmful content online", although it did not reply to The Telegraph’s questions asking on which sites these threads were found.
But the conflicted nature of some of Monster’s statements carry an element of risk for companies that are using Epik’s services to shelter from the judgement of the mainstream internet.
This month, Monster posted Bible verses to Twitter which seemed to criticise other sites’ decisions on content moderation. But he has also urged companies to take steps to ensure the content they carry stays legal.
Epik’s roster of controversial companies might be safe for now, but the abyss of the digital wilderness never feels far away.
Свежие комментарии