8chan creator says ‘shut the site down’
Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, arrived. His response was immediate and instinctive.
“Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, ’All right, we have to research if there’s an 8chan connection,’” he said about the online message board he started in 2013.
It didn’t take him long to find one.
Moments before the shooting Saturday, a four-page message whose author identified himself as the gunman appeared on 8chan. The person who posted the message encouraged his “brothers” on the site to spread the contents far and wide.
In recent months, 8chan has become a go-to resource for violent extremists. At least three mass shootings this year — including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, California — have been announced in advance on the site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.
Brennan started the online message board as a free-speech utopia. But now, 8chan is known as something else: a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists.
On Sunday, Brennan, who stopped working with the site’s current owner last year, called for it to be taken offline before it leads to further violence.
“Shut the site down,” Brennan said in an interview.“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.”
Brennan, who has claimed that he got the idea for 8chan while on psychedelic mushrooms, set out to create what he called a free-speech alternative to 4chan, a better-known online message board. He was upset that 4chan had become too restrictive, and he envisioned a site where any legal speech would be welcome, no matter how toxic.
8chan has been run out of the Philippines by Jim Watkins, a U.S. Army veteran, since 2015, when Brennan gave up control of the site.
The site remains nearly completely unmoderated, and its commitment to keeping up even the most violent speech has made it a venue for extremists to test out ideas, share violent literature and cheer on the perpetrators of mass killings. Users on 8chan frequently lionize mass gunmen using internet vernacular, referring to their body counts as “high scores” and creating memes praising the killers.