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Cyber

The State of California Could Have Stopped 8Chan: It Didn't

2019-11-11

[Bellingcat] Over the course of 2019, the website “8chan” has directly inspired four acts of terrorism around the world, killing 76 people and wounding 80. The mass shootings in Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso are well-known. The mass shooting in Halle, Germany, which killed two and injured two more, received less attention. Since 8chan was dropped by its service providers and taken offline after the El Paso attack, the Halle shooter was unable to announce his killing spree there. Yet the connection was still obvious: the shooter’s attack was livestreamed, like the Christchurch shooting. He identified himself as “anon”, a general term for chan users.

The most direct connection between the Halle shooter and 8chan was hidden in the killer’s manifesto, in a joking reference he made to someone named Mark Mann. The shooter claimed Mann helped fund the attack. There is no evidence of this. But Mark Mann is an employee of NT Technology, an internet service provider owned by Jim Watkins, who also owns 8chan. Mann is Jewish, and the Halle shooter’s reference to him was almost certainly a cruel joke. The fact that Mann was referenced at all suggests the shooter was deeply familiar with the infamous image board.

8chan’s ability to continue inspiring attacks after its dissolution is disturbing. More worrying still is the fact that, over the last several months, Jim Watkins has waged a slow, grinding battle to bring the site back online. A number of volunteers, including 8chan’s former founder and the co-author of this article, Fredrick Brennan, have fought tooth and nail to stop him. But early in November the site, rebranded as “8kun”, came back online.

As I write this, 8kun has gone up and down for the past several days. It was dropped from its most recent host, a Russian ISP located two hours from North Korea, on November 3, 2019. It will come back online. If not via the normal web, than through peer-to-peer means like Tor. There was, however, a point at which the resurrection of 8chan could’ve been stopped — perhaps even forever. This is the story of why that did not happen.

THE STAKES INVOLVED
A discerning reader might ask: if the Halle shooting happened while 8chan was offline, does it really matter if it comes back up again? Will keeping it down reduce the number of shootings it helps to spawn?

There is no certain answer here, but there is evidence to suggest that yes, keeping 8chan offline is better for public safety. While the Halle shooting happened with 8chan offline, the shooter had presumably been a regular user of the image board for quite some time. It is reasonable to assume he was radicalized there. Since he went out of his way to copy several of the Christchurch shooter’s tactics, we can assume that manifesto had a significant impact on him.

In the wake of the Christchurch and Poway shootings, anons went out of their way to declare the killers “saints” and share their manifestos to every corner of the Internet. The Christchurch manifesto was even printed and sold on the streets of Ukraine. With 8chan down, there has been no similar concerted effort to spread the Halle shooter’s manifesto, nor the home-built firearm instructions he sought to make viral. 8chan’s /pol board was unique within the fascist media ecosystem; no comparable community of a similar size exists.

Outside of /pol, 8chan was also the host of the Q Research Board. It was the only place where the mysterious individual(s) known as “Q” could post and confirm his identity to his followers. With 8chan down, there were no Q drops for three months. During the brief time when “8kun” was online and functional, Q made four new drops, breathing life into the dangerous cult that exists around the conspiracy theories Q pushes. Qanon has already inspired a murder and a number of non-lethal attacks, including one on the Hoover Dam. In August of 2019, the FBI warned that conspiracy theories like Qanon encourage, “…the targeting of specific people, places and organizations, thereby increasing the risk of extremist violence against such targets.”

THE FIGHT TO KEEP 8CHAN OFFLINE
A number of journalists and activists, including me, have fought to keep 8chan in its grave. No one has put in more work than Fredrick Brennan. Since he is the man who founded and coded the website back in 2013, this is probably appropriate. The public face of this fight has been a social media campaign to name and shame the companies hosting and providing registration services to 8chan. This stopped the site from coming back online, but as long as Jim Watkins and his businesses own the servers 8chan’s data was stored on, they can continue their efforts to bring the site back, perhaps indefinitely.

Reporting by Mashable on August 5, 2019 identified Centauri Communications as the company that provided internet access to 8chan’s physical servers. In early September, 2019, Fredrick Brennan verified that Centauri’s servers were the second to last step on the traceroute for N.T. Technology, Jim Watkins’s company. Without Centauri, his business would not be online.

Posted by:Skidmark

#3 “8chan” has directly inspired four acts of terrorism around the world, killing 76 people

Utter Bull Schiff.

Posted by: Glenmore 2019-11-11 15:26

#2 Benghazi

Posted by: g(r)omgoru PB 2019-11-11 12:35

#1 Blaming Q for terrorist attacks. Rich.

Posted by: 49 Pan 2019-11-11 12:33

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