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Incel hate site jumps to Iceland after doMEn suspends .me domain

Kevin Murphy, November 21, 2018, 07:59:46 (UTC), Domain Registries

Incels.me, a web forum that hosts misogynist rants by “involuntarily celibate” men, has found a new home after .me registry doMEn suspended its domain.
The web site has reappeared, apparently unscathed, under Iceland’s .is domain, at incels.is.
doMEn said in a blog post yesterday that it had suspended incels.me at the registry level due to the owner “allowing part of its members to continuously promote violence and hate speech”.
The suspension happened October 15, and the site reappeared in .is not long after. It’s not entirely clear why doMEn chose to explain its decision over a month later. It said:

The decision to suspend the domain was made after the .ME Registry exhausted all other possibilities that could assure us that the registrant of incels.me domain and the owner of i
incels.me forum was able to remove the subject content and prevent the same or similar content from appearing on the forum again.

An “incel” is a man who has decided that he is too ugly, charmless, short, stupid or otherwise unattractive, and is therefore permanently unfuckable.
While that may provoke sympathetic thoughts, a great many of the incels frequenting sites like incels.me choose to channel their frustration into cartoonish misogyny ranging from the laughable to the extremely disturbing.
While the registry didn’t mention it, the site also has many threads that appear to encourage suicide.
doMEn seems to have turned off the domain because certain threads crossed the line from misogyny to incitement to violence against women.
The Montenegro-based company said it had been monitoring the site since May, after being told that “certain members” of the forum “might have been involved in or associated with” an attack in Toronto that killed 10 people in April, a charge the incels.is admin denies.
The second reason given — preventing content appearing in future — may be the crux here.
The site’s administrator said in a post on the new site that he had personally removed all of the threads highlighted by doMEN as being in violation of its registry policies.
He also posted a partial email thread between himself and his former registrar, China-based NiceNIC.net, in which he explains how difficult it is to monitor all the content posted by his users. He wrote on the forum:

They obviously weren’t going to give us a fair shake either way, and we’re not going to search through 1.6 MILLION posts nor do we have the technological capabilities to check to see if any of them are against their vague anti-abuse policy.
…
Domain registries have no place in enforcing arbitrary rules against domains that go against their ideology.

It seems from the thread that Afilias, 37%-owner of doMEn and .me back-end provider, had a hands-on role in the suspension.
Incels certainly isn’t the first controversial site to have to resort to TLD-hopping to stay alive.
The most notable example is piracy site KickAssTorrents, which bounced from ccTLD to ccTLD for years before finally being shut down by the US Feds.
The incels.is admin said he had confidence in Iceland’s registry due to “their stance as pro free-speech enforcers”.
But ISNIC is not above suspending domains when the associated sites break Icelandic law. Four years ago it took down some domains associated with ISIS.
The takedown comes not long after GoDaddy attracted attention for suspending the domain of far-right Twitter clone Gab.com, again due to claims of incitement to violence related to an act of domestic terrorism.

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Comments (2)

  1. Jim Spaid says:
    January 14, 2019 at 8:49 am

    Though your reporting of the facts pertaining to the relocation of this web-site are certainly credible, your purported ‘definition’ of whatever it means to any/all to believe themselves ‘involuntarily [inhumanely treated]’ has obviously nothing to do with your own site’s interests in separating ‘social-studies’ from ‘civil discourse’, either, does it? ;]
    -“Words are not actions, feelings aren’t facts” ~Al-Anon
    Meantime, I’d commend you to quit appealing to sensationalized reporting over genuinely ‘in-depth’ … ‘journaling’, is it really, ‘gens Y-Z’?
    But of course, ‘sub-[redit]’ an update on all there is here in these alleged ‘united states’ alone why any hetro-males shouldn’t be aggrieved that so many of our championship-aggressors of post-W.L.M. have less patients than even the average pop-cultures’ webbing put-downs in this ‘great-reversal’. Hey, just sayin’ your 2020’s comin’ and tho we’ll all be dealin’ with the fall-out of our own earth pollution (nevermind all these ‘revenge of the nerds’ mindfulness ‘ablutions’?)
    ~Just another so-called ‘man’ in these suspiciously popular sightings!
    =need we say more, dear guys who’re about to get ‘clocked’ by the ‘silicone valley’s’ own ‘Time’s Up’ movement?

    Reply

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