3 min read
The website has become a go-to resource for violent extremists in the past few months.
Moments before the El Paso shooting last week, a detailed message whose author identified himself as the gunman appeared on the website 8chan. The person who posted the message encouraged his like-minded people on the website to spread the contents far and wide.
And this is not the first mass shooting incident that has been associated with the website in focus. Only in 2019, at least three mass shootings attacks — including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. — have been announced in advance on 8chan’s site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.
The online messaging board 8chan (which might not be accessible to you at the moment) has apparently become a hub where anonymous users announce their upcoming activity well before the terrorist attacks took place.
It must be noted that 8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare’s service — an American web infrastructure and server provider. And as of now, Cloudflare has sent notice to the website holder that it is terminating 8chan as a customer effective from midnight Pacific Time yesterday. As 8chan announced on Twitter;
Some of you might’ve read the @Cloudflare news already. They’re dropping 8chan. https://t.co/FQJrv9wzvn
There might be some downtime in the next 24-48 hours while we find a solution (that includes our email so timely compliance with law enforcement requests may be affected).— 8chan (8ch.net) (@infinitechan) August 5, 2019
The reason for the removal of the site is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.
Even the site’s owner Fredrick Brennan has himself called for the shutdown of the site. As he stated;
“Shut the site down. 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 negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”
It is worth mentioning here that users on 8chan frequently lionized mass shootings using jokey internet slangs, referring to their body counts as “high scores” and creating memes praising the killers.
