Investigation finds 151 tech companies, including GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Google, and Amazon, offering hosting, DNS, or CDN services to sites spreading hate speech
Aaron Sankin / Gizmodo : Tweets: @fightextremism , @randfish , @nickmartin , @nickmartin , @russpitts , and @asankin . Thanks: @jstrauss Tweets: CEP / @fightextremism : Social media has received the most attention for providing a platform for hate groups and extremists. But internet service companies such as GoDaddy and Cloudflare are just as guilty. https://gizmodo.com/... Rand Fishkin / @randfish : Exceptional reporting deserves recognition. This is the most comprehensive, high quality investigation of who hosts hate sites, how they justify it, and what the real world impacts are: https://gizmodo.com/... Nick Martin / @nickmartin : Arizona-based @GoDaddy provides services to at least 130 hate-based websites identified by @Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/... Nick Martin / @nickmartin : This statement from @GoDaddy is pretty absolutist. The company says it continues to do business with purveyors of hate, racism and bigotry on principle. https://gizmodo.com/... https://twitter.com/... Russ Pitts / @russpitts : Fascinating. @Gizmodo has the receipts on which tech companies are serving hate groups, and the acts of terror those sites have inspired. Your move, @Google, @amazon, @GoDaddy, @DreamHost, @Cloudflare, et al. https://twitter.com/... Aaron Sankin / @asankin : I tracked down the companies that make it possible for hate groups to spread their message online https://gizmodo.com/... Thanks: @jstrauss
Context & Ripple Effects
This investigation moves the deplatforming debate off social media and onto the plumbing: Gizmodo and the Counter Extremism Project name 151 infrastructure providers — registrars, hosts, DNS, CDNs — serving hate sites, with GoDaddy alone linked to at least 130 of them. It lands two years after the [[a:921513|EFF warned that GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare barring neo-Nazis set a dangerous precedent for silencing legitimate voices]], framing exactly the tension these companies now have to answer for.
The timing matters: weeks after publication, Cloudflare terminated 8chan and the site scrambled to Epik as a fallback registrar, a live demonstration of what happens when an infrastructure provider acts on this kind of exposure. Later reporting on hate groups raising money through Stripe, PayPal, Facebook, and Amazon despite their policies shows the same gap repeating one layer up the stack.
First-order effects
- GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Google, Amazon, and the other named providers face immediate pressure to explain why their acceptable-use policies don't cover the hate sites they serve — GoDaddy most acutely, given its 130-site footprint in the report.
- The hate sites themselves gain unwanted visibility: their hosting relationships are now mapped publicly, making each provider relationship a target for campaigns like the ones that preceded Cloudflare's 8chan exit.
Second-order effects
- Sites pushed out by mainstream providers concentrate on permissive alternatives — the Epik path 8chan took — which turns small registrars into de facto safe harbors and concentrates reputational and legal risk on them.
- Payment and app-store platforms already flagged in related coverage (hate groups fundraising via Stripe, PayPal, Facebook, and Amazon) can expect the same naming-and-shaming template applied to their layers, since the investigation establishes that policy-plus-enforcement gaps survive scrutiny at every level of the stack.
Third-order effects
- If infrastructure-level enforcement becomes the standard response, moderation authority effectively migrates from content platforms to a handful of registrars, hosts, and CDNs — concentrating speech decisions in fewer, less visible hands, which is precisely the precedent the EFF flagged in 2017.
- The recurring pattern across hosting, payments, and audio platforms suggests voluntary terms-of-service enforcement will keep proving insufficient, strengthening the case for regulators to treat extremist-content handling as a compliance obligation rather than a branding choice.
The trend: Content moderation is steadily moving down the internet stack — from social feeds to payments to hosting, DNS, and CDN providers — with each high-profile termination pushing banned sites toward a shrinking set of willing infrastructure providers.