Why the hell is 8chan still online?

There is no reasonable argument in 2019 for 8chan’s continued existence on the internet.

Just look at the recent history. QAnon, an alarming and deeply absurd conspiracy theory, blew up there. When reports surfaced in 2018 that Louisiana police possessed a “full list of antifa” doc — actually just the names of anti-Trumpers scraped from petitions and Facebook events — 8chan was found to be hosting the same list.

Then there are the mass shootings. The angry, hateful men allegedly behind the 2019 shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand; Poway, California; and, most recently, El Paso, Texas all used the site to promote their activities. The El Paso suspect apparently shared an entire, twisted manifesto.

This sums it up pretty succinctly:

He drew directly from the Donald Trump lexicon, employing the modern language of hate. The four-page screed was posted on 8chan about an hour before his alleged act of domestic terrorism that left 20 dead and 26 wounded as of Sunday morning.

This has happened multiple times now that we know of. The Christchurch shooter, who allegedly killed 51 and injured 50 more in his attack on a mosque, launched a video live stream minutes before the attack that he shared on 8chan (where it was then re-shared). In the aftermath of the shooting, a number of Australian telecom interests flat-out blocked their users’ access to 8chan and websites like it.

The Poway shooting suspect — who also by his own admission attempted to burn down a California mosque in March 2019 — allegedly killed one and injured three in the April attack on a local synagogue. He used 8chan to share an anti-Semitic letter and a failed live stream, and he later admitted that he had been radicalized on the site.

None of this even mentions 8chan’s connections to GamerGate, the coordinated “swatting” efforts that occurred there, and the whole mess with child pornography. The site’s forums are a cesspool of unpopular-because-they’re-vile beliefs and hate-motivated discussion. The type of content that has no place in civilized society.

Jim Watkins, the American owner of 8chan who lives in the Philippines, generally lets the site speak for itself. He did provide a comment in a Sunday report from The Washington Post on El Paso and the alleged shooter’s manifesto, but it read only (bizarrely): “I hope you are well.” Watkins did, however, defend 8chan as a free speech refuge in a video released after the Christchurch shooting.

He drew directly from the Donald Trump lexicon, employing the modern language of hate.

Look past the the content of its message boards, and 8chan is still just a website. It depends on the larger business mechanisms of the internet for its continued existence. And in this era where it’s been proven that de-platforming works, it’s hard to see 8chan mentioned again and again in connection with these crimes without wondering how it continues to exist.

A simple WHOIS search will tell you that the site’s domain name is registered with the Canadian company Tucows Domains Inc. Mashable reached out to Tucows for comment on its business relationship with 8chan, and to see if recent events have led to a reconsideration of that relationship, but we received no response prior to publish.

8chan also does business with Cloudflare. Every website you visit stores its data somewhere on the internet, through what’s called a web hosting service. Cloudflare exists in a layer situated between the hosting service and you, the visitor, offering privacy and security services to website proprietors.

So when you try to look up where the data for a site like 8chan is hosted, for example, the WHOIS result only shows you Cloudflare. If someone wanted to stage a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on a website they’d need to know where the site is hosted. Engaging a company like Cloudflare, then, offers a measure of security against such attacks.

“We’re not the host of the information,” Cloudfare general counsel Doug Kramer said during a Sunday phone call. “We’re a passthrough that sits between a website user and that host to screen for cybersecurity risks. But we are not the origin host of the information, which is an important part of the way we approach these issues.”

The approach in this case is straightforward: Cloudflare won’t be discontinuing its relationship with 8chan. The company will continue to provide the site with cybersecurity services, even though it’s provided a platform for three of the alleged mass shooters in 2019.

There’s a complicating factor when it comes to Cloudflare that makes the current situation a little muddier: in Aug. 2017, almost exactly two years ago, the company very publicly severed its relationship with another website that trades in white supremacist ideologies — The Daily Stormer. 

That situation was a little different, however. As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote at the time: 

Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. 

The company didn’t take action because of The Daily Stormer’s problematic content, it did so because people involved with the site implicated Cloudfare as a supporter of the beliefs expressed there. That was a bridge too far for the company, and so ties were cut.

In the case of 8chan, there’s been no effort to make Cloudflare an accomplice. The company is essentially an internet cop, protecting and serving the public — namely, the websites in its network — against online threats. As long as 8chan leaves Cloudflare out of its dirty business, it can continue to take advantage of the company’s cybersecurity services.

For Cloudflare, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with the beliefs expressed by the websites in its network; it’s a general focus on protecting everyone who merits protection. And because there’s no central rulebook or regulatory framework dictating what is and isn’t acceptable behavior online, the company takes the stance of not wading in to who should or shouldn’t be a customer.

I don’t think I’m alone in reading that stance as hogwash. We’re living in a very particular moment in history where toxic ideologies have wormed their way into public view due to bad faith arguments that put a belief structure like white supremacy on the same footing as racial equality. 

Cloudflare is technically right about there being no rulebook, but this is a situation where common sense ought to prevail. Prince himself wrote in 2017 that it’s the company’s “sole discretion” to kick users out of the network.

Cloudflare is technically right about there being no rulebook, but common sense ought to prevail.

White supremacy is a hate-based ideology that is uniformly bad. Any website that gives a platform to its supporters is engaging in a racist action and should be de-platformed. A business like Cloudflare may not be able to remove 8chan’s data, but I’d argue — and did argue, in my call with Kramer — that there’s an obvious moral dilemma in offering racists the same protections as everyone else.

For now, 8chan remains online. Cloudflare, through Kramer, expressed the hope that legislative action will lead to a clearer set of rules for handling situations like this. Though that seems unlikely with the current president and the divided state of the U.S. legislature.

Remember, online conduct has become a deeply political issue in 2019. Right-wing views have become so entwined with hateful belief systems that many Republican figures have successfully argued that the platform gatekeepers on sites like Twitter and Facebook are biased against conservatives.

That’s of course not the case. Twitter in particular has taken more flak than perhaps any other social media platform for its terrible track record when it comes to shutting down race/gender/religion-based harassment and holding bad actors accountable. But because “social media has an anti-conservative bias” is a talking point, the kind of legislation a service like Cloudflare would need to justify an action against 8chan isn’t even close to happening.

That gets us back to the moral component here. I, and hopefully others, would argue that Cloudflare — and any other internet business that helps to keep a site like 8chan online — has an ethical responsibility to recognize the facts about such an extreme example, and take action.

This is a website that was instrumental in publicizing three of 2019’s horrific mass shootings (that we know of). It’s also a proven destination for the radicalization of toxic beliefs, and it has a long history of fostering horrible behavior both online and off. It’s long past time for the companies that make the internet run to stop hiding behind the lack of legislation and take common sense action.