KickAss Torrents (Photo : Facebook)
Following the successive KickassTorrents and Torrentz.eu shut downs, torrent fans flocked to the best free download alternatives led by The Pirate Bay and ExtraTorrent. The latter, however, appears to be dealing with its share of serious takedown threats as a new report indicated that the official Facebook page for ExtraTorrent has been deleted.
The fan page removal, according to TorrentFreak, came following complaints lodged by the music group IFPI, which tagged ExtraTorrent as host for copyright infringing materials. While the page deletion is nothing new as the file-sharing site also saw its Facebook page and other social media assets nuked in the past years, the latest takedown efforts seem bent on totally erasing ExtraTorrent's social network presence.
Not only that the ExtraTorrent Facebook page was removed but also the FB accounts of ExtraTorrent admins and moderators were blocked, the report added. And users attempting to share ExtraTorrent-related URLs were greeted with the warning: "It looks like a link you're sharing might be unsafe. If you can, please remove this link: extratorrent.cc ... If you can't remove this link and you still want to share it, please complete the security check below."
Also, numerous attempts by ExtraTorrent users to set up Facebook fan page that is independent of the ExtraTorrent operators were by similar action - the pages were swiftly taken out, TorrentFreak reported.
"They blocked multiple ExtraTorrent pages ... First our main page, and after some fans made new pages, these were removed every other day as well," the new site reported ExtraTorrent operator identified only as SaM as saying.
At the time of writing, ExtraTorrent said that in order to stay in the safe zone the site will temporarily stop its social media activities but according to TorrentFreak, another Facebook fan page of ExtraTorrent came up that likely will suffer the same fate of the earlier attempts.
The latest development further highlighted the ongoing crackdown on piracy that saw KickassTorrents forced offline and Torrentz voluntarily shutting down operations. KAT came down following the arrest of its alleged owner Artem Vaulin and the subsequent seizure of its domains by the U.S. government.
For its part, Torrentz bade farewell this week to its millions of users for still unknown reason.
Torrent fans orphaned by the sites' sudden demise were left to rely on the so-called KAT mirrors and alternatives with ExtraTorrent and The Pirate Bay leading the pack. But with ExtraTorrent seems inching closer to the same route first taken by KickassTorrents and Torrentz, it looks like that the ever resilient TPB will be left as the man standing among the torrenting alternatives.
