Philippines-Based 8chan Creator Slams Site: 'Shut It Down' After El Paso Shooting

Already infamous for livestreaming the Christchurch, New Zealand massacre of March 15, imageboard 8chan was finally shut down Monday after publishing the hateful and racist four-page manifesto of the El Paso, Texas mass murderer who shot dead 20 people on Aug. 3.

8chan was taken offline permanently after Cloudflare, the network infrastructure provider, took down its CDN service. Voxility, a web services company that rented servers to the site's hosting provider, also took down 8chan’s servers.

The action followed an appeal by 8chan's founder, Fredrick Brennan to take down the site. Brennan originally created 8chan in 2013 as a utopia for free speech. The site later morphed into a recruiting platform and sounding board for white supremacists.

8chan is notorious for its harmful internet subcultures and violent activism, and is linked to three mass shootings in the United States and New Zealand.

The popularity of 8chan is incomprehensible given its hatefulness. Alexa ranked the site as the 3,832nd most visited site in the world. It received an average of 35,000 unique visitors per day.

8chan is now owned by Jim Watkins, founder of San Francisco-based N.T. Technologies. This firm took over full control of the Japanese website, 2channel, a Japanese textboard that was at one time Japan’s most popular online community, with some 10 million users accessing it daily.

Brennan agreed to partner 8chan with 2channel, and subsequently relocated to the Philippines in October 2014. Brennan officially resigned from 8chan in July 2016, and turned the site over to Watkins and his son, Ron, who now acts as the site administrator.

Watkins has been living in the Philippines since 2004 and 8chan was run from the country. He lives only a short distance away from Brennan.

Back in 2016, Watkins said that while his site was spreading racist ideologies, he isn't as racist, according to the news and opinion website, Splinter.

"I don’t have a problem with white supremacists talking on 8chan," said Watkins. "They have reasons for their beliefs. I don’t need to justify their reasons."

Watkins has refused interview requests after the El Paso mass shooting. His son Ron, has consistently dismissed the idea of 8chan doing more to stop mass shootings or other types of violence.

Reacting to the El Paso and Dayton, Ohio mass shootings, Brennan said 8chan's current owners should “do the world a favor and shut it off.”

“Once again, a terrorist used 8chan to spread his message as he knew people would save it and spread it,” Brennan told The Washington Post. “The board is a receptive audience for domestic terrorists.”

He also told the New York Times that the site, “[is] 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.”

8chan has been clearly linked to three horrific mass murders: the Christchurch massacre in March where 50 Muslims were shot dead; the Poway, California synagogue shooting in April where one person was killed; and the El Paso mass shooting on Aug. 3 where 20 people were murdered.

On Aug. 5, Cloudflare terminated its service to 8chan citing the latter's connection to various shootings across the United States. In its blog, Cloudflare explained "8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare's service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time.

"The rationale 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."