Spreading hate across the internet: the birth of 8chan
Fredrick Brennan’s angry childhood led to the creation of one of the darkest corners of the online world. Nicky Woolf reports
On 27 April, before he burst into a San Diego synagogue and opened fire, killing one worshipper and injuring three more, the gunman said goodbye to the community that radicalised him. “It’s been real dudes,” he posted on the far-right politics board, /pol/, on the imageposting site 8chan. “I’ve only been lurking for a year and a half, yet what I’ve learned here is priceless.” The story was familiar. Six weeks earlier, a 28-year-old had killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before starting his attack, he too had posted on 8chan’s /pol/ board. “It’s been a long ride,” he had written. He signed off his post: “Meme magic is real.” The first response from an anonymous 8chan user urged him to “get the high score”.
From its effect on the world, 8chan could be ranked as one of the internet’s most dangerous sites. Some have even compared it to terrorist groups like al-Qa’eda or Islamic State. The pattern is similar: men – and it is always men – find their way there, and get radicalised into an extreme ideology that drives some of them to violence. But there is no fundamentalist preacher for the ideology of chan sites. It’s mostly lonely people who find themselves in a febrile information ecosystem without precedent in human history. Chan sites like 8chan are something entirely new: organic communities of anonymous participants that have started to behave almost like a new consciousness, more powerful and dangerous than the sum of its parts.
The anger and hate that spews from 8chan is not a conscious extension of the anger and hate of its creator – though he had plenty – but an inevitable by-product of the dark structure he built. The story of 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, is a perfect expression of this: born with a profound disability and shuttled in and out of foster care, his creation of the site was born not out of cold calculation or political ambition, but from a need to find community in loneliness. 8chan is a monster, but its creator had no idea what it would become.
Brennan was born in 1994 in upstate New York. He lived with his parents in a trailer park in the small town of Livingston until they divorced when he was five, and Brennan moved with his brother and father to Craryville, NY. His childhood was one of intense pain. Brennan had inherited from his mother a genetic disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta. The condition, which stunted his growth and confined him to a wheelchair, is often called “brittle bone disease”. By the time he was 19, Brennan estimates he had broken his bones 120 times. The condition meant constant agony, but also boredom. After the divorce, his mother’s new boyfriend Bill showed him how to use a computer. Brennan was smart, always ranking near the top of his class in reading and writing. But he wasn’t yet interested in much other than gaming. “Because we were poor we didn’t have many different games,” Brennan tells me. “So we used to play the same one over and over.” One had a little online forum for players. Brennan made friends there; they swapped tips. It was there that Brennan first stumbled across chan culture. In fact, it stumbled upon him.
It is important here to explain how chan sites work. 4chan, the oldest and most influential English-language chan site, is split into a limited number of topic-specific boards. There are boards for various interests – cars, knitting, anime – and each one is a community of users, who make posts and comment on others’ posts. No registration is required, and each comment is anonymous. Anonymity is key: it means there is no incentive to follow social norms. With its users an anonymous mass, free from the effects of individuality – shame, in particular – chan culture forms organically. The bigoted argot that emerges serves to denote in-group status:
taking offence is for outsiders.
“From its effect on the world, 8chan could be ranked as one of the world’s most dangerous sites – some have compared it to al-Qa’eda”
One of the things the users on 4chan’s raucous and popular “random” board, /b/, liked to do was go on “raids”. In a raid, users pile on to another site en masse, saturating it, disrupting the community and generally pissing people off. Getting a rise out of others is core to chan culture. By the early 2000s, 4chan was growing exponentially, and at some point, its users picked on Brennan’s video-game board. To Brennan, it was as if an alien invasion force had descended from the sky. He realised the internet could be used for destructive as well as constructive purposes – and he saw how much fun the destructive side could be. In the force of 4chan’s raid, which demolished his little community, Brennan saw for the first time in his life something that could make him feel powerful. He went to 4chan.
By 2006, the year he turned 12, he was on the site “all the time”. It was fun. On his old board there would be a few posts every day; on 4chan, every 30 seconds there was something new. He spent as much time at the computer as possible. “My dad, he just felt like: well, he’s in a wheelchair, so it doesn’t make sense for him to do anything else but play with the computer,” he says. When he was 14, Brennan was placed into foster care. 4chan became increasingly important to him. “Maybe it wasn’t really a family,” he says, “but it definitely made me feel a sense of normalcy.”
In the meantime, Brennan’s online identity was developing. “I was known as the guy who was always talking about eugenics, that was my thing,” he says. He posted about it every day. In 2014, he wrote a disturbing essay, published on the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, calling for the sterilisation of people with diseases like his. It simmers with anger, especially at his father, whom he calls “a complete deadbeat”. It ends: “I am simply asking for compassion from an ignorant society that falsely believes it is unethical to give genetically defective people incentives not to reproduce. I am simply arguing for a world full of healthy, happy children who can play outside with their friends without breaking their legs.” Today, Brennan says that he never identified as a Nazi; his feelings were masochistic. “I literally wanted a new version of Nazi Germany to take over and kill everyone like me.”
When Brennan turned 18, he started working for Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace for cheap digital labour, doing small writing jobs or classification work. “Bottom-of-thebarrel stuff.” His first year, he made $7,000. But he was also learning the system. He moved to New York City, where he met a girl. One day, he did magic mushrooms with her and, while high, the idea for a new site came to him where users could make their own infinitely recurring boards, rather than be limited to what 4chan’s admins [controllers] made. By the next day, he was already writing the code for what would become 8chan. “It was kinda: boom – an instant idea,” he says.
That was October 2013. The following year, the site would take off in a way Brennan never expected, when a rabid new online movement, kicked off every other chan site, came looking for a home. Gamergate was a large, leaderless group of misogynist video game fans, annoyed by what they considered the forced diversification of what had been a white male safe space, who began a campaign of targeted harassment against the “social justice warriors” they blamed. Kicked off 4chan, then kicked off 7chan and several other alt-chans, Gamergate needed a home and Brennan saw an opportunity. He dialled into a Gamergate live-stream chat and made his pitch. Gleefully, the Gamergaters moved in. Discovering Brennan’s disability, they gave him a new nickname: Hotwheels.
At best, he was wilfully blind to Gamergate’s politics. But the traffic they represented was, to Brennan, unarguable. 8chan went from 100 posts a day to more than 10,000 every hour. It was “insane”, Brennan says. He was euphoric. The euphoria quickly faded as he realised what he had taken on. The next two years were, he says, “the hardest of my life”. He had to keep the servers going. He had to keep the software going. He had to talk to the media. “Honestly, sometimes it felt like I was the president of a small nation,” he says. He wasn’t their leader, exactly: on chan boards leadership is impossible. But as the owner of the site’s domain, he was legally responsible for removing illegal content such as images of child sex abuse. Far from leading the mob, he spent his days desperately trying to keep up with it. It was completely out of control.
Brennan only held on to ownership of 8chan for about six weeks after Gamergate arrived. The funding platform Patreon cancelled his account; money was running low. The site was in such chaos, the traffic was so extreme, and there were so many attacks and legal threats flooding over him that he decided he had to find someone to take ownership. He picked Jim Watkins, a US army veteran in his 50s who owned a pig farm near Manila. His company, NT Technology, which operated several porn sites, assumed legal responsibility for the domain and provided the hardware, while Brennan would continue to run the software and grow the community. He moved to the Philippines to work for Watkins and, in January 2015, signed the domain over to him.
The content on 8chan is among the most offensive, violent and bigoted on the web. It became a sump for the most racist and misogynist of users – especially on the /pol/ board, where the most far-right political viewpoints collected. A chan site becomes a sort of psychotic consciousness in its own right: an explosive mix of nihilists looking to have fun and mess with people, lonely naïfs who don’t get the joke, and everyone in between. When an impressionable, troubled person winds up on a site like 8chan, they can soak up the culture like a sponge; some turn to violence to impress this faceless morass.
It is the structure of a chan site itself that radicalises people. “The other anonymous users are guiding what’s socially acceptable, and the more and more you post on there you’re being affected by what’s acceptable and that changes you. Maybe you start posting Nazi memes as a joke… but you start to absorb those beliefs as your own, eventually,” Brennan says. “Anonymity makes people reveal themselves, but because there are other anonymous users – not just one person in a black box – it also changes what they reveal.” It
“Maybe you start posting Nazi memes as a joke, but you start to absorb those beliefs
as your own, eventually”
changes what they do as well.
The killings in Christchurch and San Diego were not isolated incidents. It is difficult to prove beyond doubt, but several more mass shootings, including in Umpqua, Oregon, and Isla Vista, California, are linked to the culture of sites like 8chan and 4chan. By April 2016, a little over a year after he sold the site to Watkins, Brennan had soured not only on 8chan, but on the whole idea it represented. He now has no links with it; Watkins and NT Technology are the site’s sole legal owners. In essence, Brennan had created one of the most dangerous sites on the internet, but he had done so by accident.
Brennan still lives in the Philippines, but he is married, has converted to Christianity and spends his time designing his own fonts. When he sees news like the Christchurch shooting, it makes him “worried for the future”. He tells me: “There’s this idea that if we have unbridled freedom of speech that the best ideas will fall out. But I don’t really think that’s true any more. I mean, I’ve looked at 8chan and I’ve been its admin, and what happens is the most rage-inducing memes are what wins out.” Asked what he would say to his 14-year-old self, he pauses. “Um. It sounds like a cliché, but it gets better. You’re not going to feel like that for ever.” He says he no longer supports eugenics, though he still thinks governments should provide genetic testing for disabled people who want to have children. In fact, he is voluntarily undergoing those tests now – he and his wife are thinking of having a child.