Announced only two days ago, Vox Day’s Twitter substitute SocialGalactic is already being shut down (“Another curve ball” [Internet Archive link].) The team that works on InfoGalactic, his alt-right revision of the Wikipedia, had joined forces with OneWay to build SocialGalactic on Fediway’s distributed network engine. The platform claimed 2,500 users after the first 48 hours of operation.

Vox Day did not go into detail about the decision. However, in comment a few hours after the initial announcement he had written —

Note that if you’re in the EU, you’re not going to be able to use it until we can resolve the GDPR compliance issue.

The General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) regulates data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA), and also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.

Since Vox himself lives in the EU, such a ban would be no small problem for him.

Day’s Finnish confederate Markku Koponen wrote some more revealing comments. When someone asked how soon people in the EU could gain access he wrote —

Not at this point. Could be never. We’ll have to have a lawyer take a serious look at GDPR. Then we’ll know what it takes, do we need data protection officers, and so forth. There is a chance that the simplest thing is to just block EU altogether (I will of course have backdoor access). We shall see. …Yes, but that notice is only a small part of it. Blogger [where Vox Day’s blog is hosted] can afford to have the bureaucracy required to allow access, and just nag you with the notice. You still need to comply with the entirety of GDPR and it’s so complicated that there are companies whose whole business is to explain it to you. …No, I’m just a moderator. But since I’ve had to think about GDPR myself, I tipped Vox off that this is going to be an obvious attack vector for SJWs and it’s best to plug it right from the start. …There’s always going to be some Soros-paid troll who will spend all his waking hours trying to find some small mistake somewhere in GDPR compliance. Better to just shut it down.

Being unprepared to comply with EU rules may have been the new platform’s Achilles heel.