I hope you don’t get a paywall here. I copied the whole thing if you do.
This is awesome. They did to conspiracy folks what they always say they do to science, they got the data and are exposing it. The right-wing has been creating these fake grassroots efforts, and some morally corrupt and most likely politically neutral people have been getting rich off of it. Now we know who they are. I’ve described this method of disseminating misinformation many times here, but actually tracking it, who owns the websites, who promotes the articles, you can’t do better than that.
Researchers poring through the trove say the most crucial findings concern the identities of people hosting various extremist sites and the key role Epik played in keeping material online that might otherwise have vanished from the Internet — or at least the parts of the Internet that are easily stumbled upon by ordinary users.
“The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism. “Without Epik, many extremist communities — from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis — would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the Jan. 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy.” …
Technology news site the Daily Dot reported that Ali Alexander, a conservative political activist who played a key role in spreading false voter fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, took steps after the Jan. 6 siege to obscure his ownership of more than 100 domains registered to Epik. Nearly half reportedly used variations of the “Stop the Steal” slogan pushed by Alexander and others. Alexander did not reply to requests for comment from the Daily Dot or, on Tuesday, from The Post. …
Anonymous hackers are now starting to leak the identities of Epik’s consumers. Security experts even claimed that the massive breach affects the company’s Anonymize customers, who are paying for the firm’s service to keep their identity secret. …
According to an Epik Fail Data Leaks Twitter thread, Epik works by offering an option to protect consumers’ privacy. The company is offering a Domain-Add-On called “Anonymize,” which promises full anonymity of their identities. …