El Paso Massacre Renews Spotlight on Online Forum

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The man suspected of killing 20 people and injuring 26 more in a shooting rampage at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, allegedly posted a hate-filled manifesto on the same fringe online message board used earlier this year by the suspect in the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque massacre.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the message board, known as 8chan, was founded in 2013 as a no-holds-barred bastion of unconstrained speech devoted to critiquing what its creator saw as the dominance of left-wing views in culture and politics. It is available on the open internet, though it is often blocked by corporate firewalls and isn’t indexed by Google’s search engine.

Fredrick Brennan, 8chan’s creator who has since distanced himself from the site, tweeted after Saturday’s killing spree, “Another 8chan shooting?” In that message, he attacked the forum’s owner, Jim Watkins, and called on him to shut the site.

Pressure on 8chan mounted late Sunday after Cloudflare, which provided some of the internet infrastructure for 8chan, said it would withdraw its support for the site. Cloudflare’s technology helps websites protect themselves from the floods of hacker traffic that can knock sites offline in so-called denial of service attacks.

Cloudflare has faced criticism for its willingness to support websites promoting any content or mission, including those run by neo-Nazis. Cloudflare has previously said it wasn’t its duty to police content, though in 2017, it made a notable exception by ceasing service to the Daily Stormer, a bulletin board for self-proclaimed white supremacists, after the site began claiming that Cloudflare secretly supported its ideology.

Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince, in a blog post, Sunday said “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.”

People seeking to express extremist views increasingly are migrating to fringe websites, such as 8chan, that place fewer limits on views. The man accused of the October 2018 shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead allegedly used another fringe online forum, called Gab.com, to broadcast his intentions. The company later said it had suspended the account.