8chan leaps around web in pursuit of willing host
Controversial message board shows how hard it is to stamp out hate on the internet
After several hours of downtime, 8chan, the online message board that appears to have been used by the suspect in the El Paso mass shooting to post an anti-immigrant manifesto, was again accessible for a few hours Monday, then back down again.
“8chan is coming back online around the world,” a message on the site read as of 10 a.m. Pacific time. “Shout out to our team working hard in the background to restore services.”
Sunday night, 8chan said on its Twitter account that it would be down for the next 24 to 48 hours after Cloudflare dropped it as a customer. San Francisco-based Cloudflare provides support against denial-of-service attacks on websites, so its move opened up 8chan to attacks that could take the site offline.
Calling 8chan a “cesspool of hate,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a blog post: “The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths.”
The suspect in Saturday’s El Paso shooting that killed 22 people and injured more than 20 others, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, is believed to have posted on 8chan a screed titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” in which he rails against immigrants and said the rampage was meant as a response to an “invasion” of Hispanics into Texas. The writing praises the suspect in another mass shooting who posted an antiMuslim manifesto on 8chan: the man who carried out the attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March, which killed 51 people.
The suspect in the Poway synagogue shooting in April, in which one person died and three people were injured, is also believed to have posted a manifesto on 8chan in which he complained about Jewish people.
“What these killers want to do is inspire the next, and 8chan is the place to do that,” said Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism at ADL, in an interview Monday.
Segal said he wasn’t surprised that 8chan was back up, and that it would be tough to keep it or similar platforms offline for long. He cited the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, and Gab, a far-right so
cial network, as examples of extremist sites that have persisted online despite running into technical obstacles.
“The reality is that there is a market for this hate and extremism online,” he said.
Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, said as much in his blog post: “While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online.”
There were reports that 8chan — which spun out of 4chan after that online message board was deemed to infringe on free speech in the wake of the sexist Gamergate controversy a few years ago — has already switched to a new domain name registrar, and a new host for its site. Epik, which is also known to host Gab, was 8chan’s new host. After public pressure from people such as Alex Stamos, adjunct professor at Stanford University and former Facebook security chief, the company that leased servers
to Epik cut it off.
That company, Voxility, said Monday on Twitter in response to Stamos and others who announced its ties to Epik: “We are all in the same team here! Thank you for the support and for the notes. The 3rd party hoster is blocked completely.”
Fredrick Brennan, creator of 8chan, told media outlets including the New York Times that he stopped working with 8chan’s current owner last year.
“Shut the site down,” Brennan told the Times. “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 told the Washington Post that 8chan’s owner, Jim Watkins, makes little money from the site. Watkins, a U.S. military veteran and web entrepreneur who now lives in the Philippines, would not comment to the Washington Post.
In a press conference Monday, President Donald Trump, whose racist rhetoric is being blamed for inciting violence against immigrants, said, “We must
shine light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start. The perils of the internet and social media cannot be ignored.”
Trump has repeatedly spoken of immigrants “invading” the United States.
“According to Facebook’s ad archive, Trump has run around 2,200 FB ads since May 2018 mentioning the word ‘invasion’,” tweeted Natalie Martinez, researcher for Media Matters for America. “Scrolling through, all of them seem to be about immigration.”