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VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Considerable attention has been paid by researchers to social media platforms, especially the ‘big companies’, and increasingly also messaging applications, and how effectively they moderate extremist and terrorist content on their services. Much less attention has yet been paid to if and how infrastructure and service providers, further down ‘the tech stack’, deal with extremism and terrorism. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as Cloudflare play an underestimated role in moderating the presence of extremist and terrorist content online as it is impossible for these websites to operate without DDoS protection. This is evidenced by the takedown of a wide range websites such as The Daily Stormer, 8chan, a variety of Taliban websites and more recently the organised harassment site Kiwifarms following refusal of service by Cloudflare. However, it is unclear whether there is any formal process of content review conducted by the company when it decides to refuse services. This article aims to first provide an analysis of what extremist and terrorist websites make use of Cloudflare’s services as well as other CDNs, and how many of them have been subject to takedown following refusal of service. Following this the article analyses CDNs’ terms of service and how current and upcoming internet regulation applies to these CDNs.

Online terrorism has been subject to significant change over the past twenty years. An appreciation of the roles of the Internet in terrorism was, like the Web itself, still nascent at the time of 9/11. An early focus on cyberterrorism was nevertheless, even then, giving way to a realisation that the Internet’s affordances were already altering the extremism and terrorism landscape. Some of the earliest work in this area was on extremist and terrorist websites and their purposes.

Extremist and terrorist websites never really went away, they were just overlooked for a decade by researchers and others due to a not unwarranted narrowing of focus to social media platforms and, latterly, messaging applications and adjacent online spaces.

While there is less reliance on websites by extremists and terrorists than there once was, websites remain an important component of the contemporary online extremist and terrorist ecosystem(s) and could re-emerge more strongly with accelerated disruption of extremist and terrorist content and accounts by social media platforms and adjacent services unless providers further down ‘the tech stack’ take more concerted action.