Not really. Kiwi Farms, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc. are all online; pickup artist forums; satan worshipping forums, whatever, they’re all out there. Remember

Not really. Kiwi Farms, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc. are all online; pickup artist forums; satan worshipping forums, whatever, they’re all out there. Remember most hosting providers make a living from customers, and generally don’t pull things down unless it’s super sketchy under their local laws. Dreamhost, Tucows etc. had a reputation for years for being very liberal with their hosting. Pretty much anything goes that’s not blatantly illegal. And for the many sites with controversy, they probably don’t use a hosting provider. People used to run entire forums like HN (smaller scale) on their college dorm PC; this is how Slashdot started. It’s not that hard if a college sophomore can do it. As you scale, you probably move to an actual house or building and need more servers and get a leased line from an ISP. Yes people can appeal to the internet provider(s) but they rarely act. Remember, Stormfront was self hosted for ~25 years and only got torn down because of Charlottesville. Turns out if you actually do things (rather than just talk) with shitty ideas, at least in the USA, this crosses a line.