Neo-Nazi Site Finds Home In Iceland

Image copyright Getty Images

Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has reappeared on the publicly available internet after registering a domain in Iceland.

The site was shut down at the end of August after it elicited widespread condemnation for a viral blog post mocking the death of a protestor at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The site was launched in 2013 and had previous used the domain provider GoDaddy. After apparently encouraging its readers to troll supporters of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed after a car rammed into a group of protesters near a "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville this August, the website's registration was cancelled by GoDaddy and later denied a home by Google.

The site then unsuccessfully tried to register domains in Russia and Albania before it set up on the "dark web" - a subsection of the internet only accessible with a special browser.

Iceland has some of the world's most stringent free speech protection and privacy laws, a point stressed by one of the latest stories on The Daily Stormer site.

As a furore over paedophile's links to Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson has led to the collapse of Iceland's ruling coalition, The Daily Stormer went on to say that they believe this political instability will enable them to keep the domain active for the foreseeable future.

You may also like:

• The 'Hillary safe space' that divided the American left
• How the internet united against neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site
• Follow BBC Trending on Facebook

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Icelandic company OrangeWebsite, which describes itself as a "freedom of speech web hosting provider", is listed as a host of the new site according to registry directory site Whois.com. When contacted by BBC Trending, however, the company said it was simply a proxy and was not directly hosting the site. BBC Trending has also contacted The Daily Stormer for comment.

The Daily Stormer takes its inspiration from the Nazi Germany newspaper Der Stuermer, which was infamous for its anti-Jewish propaganda. Its publisher was Julius Streicher, a Nazi Party member who was executed for crimes against humanity in 1946.

You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.