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Topline: Jim Watkins, the owner of extremist message board 8chan, has defended the site after increased scrutiny following the shooting in El Paso, Texas, and days after the site’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, called for the platform to be shut down.
- In a video shared on YouTube, the U.S. Army veteran lashed out at reporters, Instagram and internet infrastructure companies that have cut ties to his site: “We have never protected illegal speech, as it seems we have been accused of by some less than credible journalists.”
- Watkins, who is based in the Philippines, also claimed that a gunman who killed 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday posted to Instagram, not 8chan, before the shooting, adding, “Later someone uploaded a manifesto. However, that manifesto was not uploaded by the Walmart shooter. I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but it was not uploaded by the murderer.”
- Instagram said there was nothing to support this theory and that the alleged shooter’s account had not been active for more than a year, the Guardian reported. The four-page white nationalist manifesto was posted to 8chan forum by someone identifying as the gunman,
- The site has struggled to stay online after the the link to the El Paso shooting—and its connection to previous shootings—emerged. On Monday, Cloudflare cut ties with 8chan, saying it would no longer provide protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Later, the Web hosting company Tucows announced it would drop the the site. Epik, a domain and hosting company that had previously worked with other white nationalist and neo-Nazi sites, offered a refuge to 8chan but itself was taken offline by Voxility, which had rented it server space.
- Watkins called Cloudflare’s decision “cowardly” and claimed that his company takes a “firm stand on helping law enforcement,” helping the FBI find the information needed for their investigation.
Chief critic: On Monday, Brennan, 25, tweeted: “The only ones who will suffer from 8chan going down are mass shooters who planned to use it as a platform and Jim Watkins.” Since founding the site in 2013, Brennan has distanced himself from it and its most extreme elements after leaving it 2016. After the shooting, he told the New York Times that he wanted the site shut down.
On Wednesday, he tweeted: “It’s finally starting to sink in for me that it’s over. 8chan is completely exposed right now again. No CDN wants to work with them. @EpikDotCom kicked them off, but as of when I'm writing this, 8ch.net still lists Epik as its registrar, meaning no backup plan.”
Key background: 8chan has been a breeding ground for far-right extremism and has been recently linked to the Poway, California, synagogue shooting in April and the Christchurch mosque killings in New Zealand in March.
The board was launched by Brennan as a less restrictive version of controversial message board 4chan. But following the GamerGate harassment campaign in 2014, 8chan saw some of 4chan’s most extreme users flock to the newer site.
Experts and critics have warned that kicking 8chan offline will push it deeper underground. The controversy has also put a spotlight on the internet infrastructure companies hosting websites that share extremist content.
