Online extremist haven makes forced host migration

BOSTON — The online message board 8chan suffered sporadic outages Monday after its cybersecurity provider cut it off for what it called a “cesspool of hate” following mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.

8chan was up and down after the security company Cloudflare said it would no longer provide services that protect websites from denial-of-service attacks that can make them unreachable.

The operators of 8chan said there might be downtime in the next one or two days as the site sought a solution, and online records indicated that the site had been moved to a new domain host : Sammamish, Washington-based web services provider Epik.com.

Police are investigating commentary posted on 8chan and believed to have been written by the suspect in a shooting Saturday that killed 20 people in El Paso, Texas.

With the big social networks doing a better job of moderating hate speech, incitement to violence and harassment, it’s inevitable that extreme speech is gravitating to smaller websites, said Joan Donovan, the director of the technology and social change project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Services that host and protect websites, like Cloudflare or Bitmitigate, are necessary to keep contentious, extremist-tolerant message boards like 8chan online because they typically attract hostile traffic from hacktivists aimed at overwhelming the sites and making them unreachable.

“That’s precisely the paradox that Cloudfare finds itself in,” Donovan said. “It sees itself as a necessary part of the internet infrastructure while at the same time understanding that in providing protection to these hate sites they are in some cases one of the reasons this content continues to exist or continues to stay online.”