Last Updated on 06/08/2019 by TDH Publishing (A)
The online message board 8chan, that has been linked to three mass shootings in 2019, will be terminated, Cloudfare declared late Sunday night, just hours after the site’s founder called for its end.
Cloudflare will cut off services for 8chan at midnight PDT, CEO Matthew Prince said in a statement, though he noted that another network provider may bring 8chan back online. That’s what happened in 2017 when Cloudfare booted The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi message board.
“The principle is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” Prince said. “Even if 8chan might not have profaned the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.”
During media interviews, earlier Sunday, 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan called for the imageboard ‘s end.
“Shut the site down,”Brennan told the New York Times on Sunday. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s entirely negative to everyone except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”
Founded as an alternative to the more well-known 4chan message board, 8chan, or “Infinite Chan,” has nearly 20,000 public boards. The website’s welcome is, “Welcome to 8chan, the Darkest Reaches of the Internet.”
Many of the posts that could be quickly accessed before the website’s termination included offensive photos and language.
Saturday’s shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which left at least 20 dead and more than a dozen injured, is the latest with a link to the website. The suspected gunman has been charged with capital murder and therefore the crime is being investigated as a possible hate crime after the discovery of a racist declaration on 8chan.
The death toll in the El Paso shooting increased to 22 on Monday. There are now 24 wounded.
In March, a New Zealand man posted a lengthy manifesto to Twitter and 8chan before killing 50 and injuring dozens during a rampage that was live-streamed on Facebook and Twitter.
