Extremism on lineThe Infrastructure of Hate: Epik Hosts Extremist Groups

Published 24 February 2021

Social media platforms have received the lion’s share of attention for enabling users to spread hate and disinformation and plan and incite violence and terrorist acts. Flying under the radar are infrastructure providers like Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company that works with nearly 750,000 websites and is ranked among the 50 largest web hosts. While some companies at the infrastructure level have acknowledged a level of responsibility for addressing abuse of their services—for example, this framework by domain registrars signed by leading companies such as GoDaddy, Tucows and Amazon—Epik is not among them.

Social media platforms have received the lion’s share of attention for enabling users to spread hate and disinformation and plan and incite violence and terrorist acts. Flying under the radar are infrastructure providers like Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company that works with nearly 750,000 websites and is ranked among the 50 largest web hosts. A domain is the address of a website you type into the URL bar of an internet browser. Domain registrars are companies that sell and manage unique domain names. Web hosting companies provide storage for a website’s files. A useful analogy is to think of a domain as the address of a home and the web host as the actual house. Infrastructure providers such as Epik—payment processors, cybersecurity companies—enable websites to be able to operate, much as roads and bridges allow people to travel from one place to another.

While some companies at the infrastructure level have acknowledged a level of responsibility for addressing abuse of their services—for example, this framework by domain registrars signed by leading companies such as GoDaddy, Tucows and Amazon—Epik is not among them.

In fact, Epik has been called the “right wing’s best online friend.” After Radio Wehrwolf, a podcast network popular among neo-Nazis, was shut down by its web host for violating its terms of service, it found a new home at Epik a few weeks later. Epik is also the registrar for Infowars, the website of notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that Facebook, YouTube and Apple have banned. Mr. Jones has claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, among other conspiracies.

Epik posted a three-page letter on January 11 denying it had been in talks to provide services to Parler, the social media platform lawmakers say played a role in the planning of the insurrection. Apple, Google, Amazon and many other companies declined to do business with Parler in the wake of the attack, forcing the platform offline. Epik’s letter railed against the power of “Big Tech,” the dangers of deplatforming and claimed “countering extremism and isolation with love works!” And days after Epik published its letter, reports surfaced that the company was Parler’s new registrar. As of this writing, Parler is back online with Epik still providing registrar services to the platform.