Thread: 8chan has become a meeting place for 'extremist hate.'

8chan has become a meeting place for 'extremist hate.' The founder says it's time to shut it down

Jordan Culver
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USA TODAY•August 4, 2019
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8chan has become a meeting place for 'extremist hate.' The founder says it's time to shut it down. More


Fredrick Brennan created the online message board 8chan in 2013.

After a third mass shooting in 2019 has been linked to the imageboard, even he wants it to end.

“Shut the site down,” Brennan told the New York Times on Sunday. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”

Founded as an alternative to the more well-known 4chan message board, 8chan, or _{"Infinite Chan,"} has nearly 20,000 public boards. The website's welcome is, "Welcome to 8chan, the Darkest Reaches of the Internet."

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Many of the posts that can be quickly accessed — included offensive images and language.
Saturday's shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which left 20 dead and 26 injured, is the latest with a link to the website. The suspected gunman has been charged with capital murder and the crime is being investigated as a possible hate crime after the discovery of a racist manifesto on 8chan.

In March, a New Zealand man posted a lengthy manifesto to Twitter and to 8chan before killing 50 and injuring dozens in a rampage that was live-streamed on Facebook and Twitter.

In April, a shooter posted a manifesto to 8chan before killing one woman and injuring three others at a California synagogue.

The New York Times reported 8chan, "remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of GamerGate — a loose reactionary collection of anti-feminist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan.

By Sunday evening, the shooter's alleged manifesto was still circulating on 8chan.

A 'venomous' website for 'extremist hate'

In interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, Brennan said 8chan needs to be shut down. He gave up control of the website to Army veteran Jim Watkins in 2015, both newspapers reported.

“The board is a receptive audience for domestic terrorists," Brennan told the Post.

The Washington Post called the website "one of the Web’s most venomous refuges for extremist hate."

Protection from Cloudflare

In a message at the top of its website, 8chan states, "only content that violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or other United States laws is deleted," from the imageboard and warns users that posts and boards are user-created and "do not represent the opinions of the 8chan administration."

Brennan told the Post that 8chan is a "vanity project" for Watkins that doesn't make much money. He also told the newspaper the website's servers are distributed around the world, which makes it difficult to take down.

Sleeping Giants

✔@slpng_giants

8Chan, where three racist mass killers have posted their screeds, is protected by @Cloudflare, hosted by @tucows and is monetized by @amazon.

If you’re doing business with a site that helps people spread violent, racist ideologies, you are just as culpable. Full stop.

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4:50 AM - Aug 4, 2019
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It is also protected from web-based attacks by Cloudflare, according to the Post. Cloudflare lawyer Douglas Kramer told the Post he worried dropping 8chan's protection would encourage "cyber vigilantism."

In 2017, Cloudflare cut ties with neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer.

“Inserting ourselves as the judge and jury on these things is very problematic,” Kramer said to the Post. “It’s easy for folks to approach us with one website, but for us, we need to come up with a rule that we can apply to over 20 million different web properties.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/8chan-bec...005211664.html

Network provider Cloudflare to drop 8chan after El Paso shooting

8chan Is a Megaphone for Gunmen. ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says Its Creator.

The New York Times



El Paso mass shooting is at least the third atrocity linked to 8chan this year


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