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

Since its launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet.The site can count among its readers Dylann Roof, the white teenager who slaughtered nine African Americans in Charleston (SC) in 2015, and James Jackson, who fatally stabbed an elderly black man with a sword in the streets of New York earlier in 2017. Traffic is up lately, too, at white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron March, 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 (CA), 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 kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network, and the company’s mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.