A chaplain prays at a makeshift memorial after the shooting that left 21 people dead at the Cielo ... [+]
Topline: Tucows, the internet services company, has said it will no longer register the domain of extreme forum 8chan after a gunman posted a hate-filled manifesto on the site just minutes before killing 22 people in El Paso on Saturday. Since the shooting, 8chan's founder, Fredrick Brennan, said he wanted the site shut down.
- The 21-year-old suspect in the Walmart El Paso shooting on Saturday is believed to have published an anti-immigrant manifesto targeting the Hispanic community on 8chan, just minutes before the deadly rampage. Authorities are investigating the post. At least 22 people are now dead as of Monday.
- Tucows initially said it was not planning to disable the site’s registration. Graeme Bunton, manager of public policy at the company, told the New York Times: “We have no immediate plans other than to keep discussing internally.” But the company changed its tone on Monday, telling New York Times reporter Kevin Roose that it would no longer provide its services to the message board.
- It comes as Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and security company, confirmed on Monday that it was cutting ties with 8chan and would no longer provide protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS). It said the extremist-linked platform had “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.” A number of mass shooters have posted hate-filled letters to the site before carrying out killings.
- Far-right-linked firms Epik and Anonymize are said to be running 8chan’s domain registration and protection, respectively, Mashable reported. Both companies are owned by Robert Monster, who is perhaps best-known for helping the white supremacist social media site Gab get back online after it was kicked off GoDaddy. The man suspected in the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last October had posted a hate-filled rant on the platform moments before killing 11 people.
Key background: Tucows, a Toronto-headquartered internet services company, was established in Michigan in 1993. Elliot Noss has been its CEO since 2001. Its website states that the company “actively participates in Internet governance and in shaping Internet policy to ensure that the focus remains on making the Internet better and more effective for all users.”
8chan, founded in 2013 by Brennan, was billed as a utopia of free speech and a response to the message board 4chan, which he believed had become too restrictive. 8chan has hosted extremist manifestos on its platform, including that of the gunman who killed 50 people in in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, and another who targeted a synagogue in California in April. 8chan is now owned by Jim Watkins.
Brennan, 25, said the site he founded but no longer owns was “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 a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it,” the New York Times reported.
