TUESDAY, AUGUST 6 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
“nerve center,” which shows the
board’s active threads, included a
message: “The heartbeat of 8chan
is strong.”
But as the day progressed,
8chan’s top administrator, Ron
Watkins, the son of the site’s own-
er Jim Watkins, announced that
the site’s problems were worse
than expected. He did not re-
spond to requests for comment
but wrote in tweets that the site’s
leaders were pursuing unnamed
“strategies” to bring 8chan back
online. If the deadlock continued,
Watkins tweeted, he would con-
sider bringing 8chan online with-
out a shield against attacks, “like
Ishmael in the Pequod.”
In the hours before the site
disappeared, some 8chan posters
voiced fear and resignation over
what they said was the site’s immi-
nent demise. One board leader
encouraged readers to migrate to
a new refuge on a sister site “due
to prevailing conditions of gener-
al reactionary rampancy and the
unfavorable present conditions of
this site.”
But many other 8chan posters
said they were defiant against
what they described as another
attack in the online culture wars.
“I am skipping work tomorrow
to sit on MS PAINT all f---ing day
to create a red pill for normies,”
wrote one poster, referring to a
driving principle of the site’s most
extremist “politically incorrect”
board: creating memes that are so
shocking or persuasive they will
convert mainstream audiences to
their side.
“WHEN 8CHAN GOES
OFFLINE, EVERYONE’S GOING
OUTSIDE AND SHOOTING,” an-
other poster wrote. Those posts,
and all others on 8chan, were
minutes afterward knocked
offline.
The takedowns showed how
some companies have grown
more emboldened in recent years
about their sense of online re-
sponsibility. Prince, the Cloud-
flare chief, had wrestled with his
previous decision to drop the
Daily Stormer after the Char-
lottesville violence, telling em-
ployees, “I woke up in a bad mood
and decided someone shouldn’t
be allowed on the Internet. No one
should have that power.”
BitMitigate stepped in then to
keep Daily Stormer online.
By Sunday night, Prince no lon-
ger voiced such reservations, ter-
minating 8chan’s service with a
fiery blog post saying its “lawless-
ness” had “contributed to multi-
ple horrific tragedies. Enough is
enough.”
Deirdre Mulligan, a faculty di-
rector of the Berkeley Center for
Law and Technology, said one of
the reasons companies such as
Cloudflare and Voxility have such
power is that speech online is
treated differently than speech in
the physical world. While real-
world speech is protected by the
First Amendment, she said,
“these [Internet] things that oper-
ate like public spaces are privately
owned.”
Groups that want to set up
websites are reliant on private
companies to ensure their sites
can be reached. As such, she said,
there may not always be “a corner
for them to set up a soapbox and
spread their vitriol.”
[email protected]Jay Greene contributed to this report.Proving Prince right, Cloud-
flare was quickly replaced by a
company offering similar ser-
vices, BitMitigate, whose rules of-
fer wide leniency to its clients.
“We leave law enforcement to the
experts and will not stop service
to any of our clients unless by final
court order,” it says in its terms of
service. The site has also held
itself up as a bastion of free-
speech protections for sites too
objectionable for others to sup-
port, calling itself a “nondiscrimi-
natory” provider of “bulletproof... protection with a proven com-
mitment to liberty.”
But online data first noticed by
Alex Stamos, a former Facebook
security chief now running the
Stanford Internet Observatory,
revealed early Monday that the
Vancouver, Wash.-based BitMiti-
gate had only a fraction of Cloud-
flare’s server capacity. It depend-
ed on renting equipment from
Voxility to stay afloat.
For Voxility, a U.K.-headquar-
tered firm with an office in San
Francisco, the decision to cut off
BitMitigate came almost immedi-
ately. Though relatively un-
known, Voxility provides the serv-
ers, routers and other key Internet
hardware used to run data centers
and tech firms around the world.
It’s “totally against our policy,”
Sirbu said. “As soon as we were
notified... we proceeded with
[completely] removing” BitMiti-
gate from their network. She said
Voxility was making a “firm
stand” and urged other Internet
authorities to take more action
toward “keeping the Internet a
safer place.”
BitMitigate’s parent company,
Epik, based outside Redmond,
Wash., has loudly criticized what
it calls “digital censorship” efforts
designed to “incapacitate practi-
tioners of lawful free speech.” The
hosting and domain-name firm
gained notoriety last year after
backing the far-right site Gab.
Epik chief Rob Monster wrote
Monday that the company had
not solicited 8chan’s business but
was helping to manage some of
the site’s technical needs and eval-
uating whether to offer it other
services, including a defense
against cyberattacks. “We enter
into a slippery slope when we
start to limit speech that makes us
uncomfortable,” Monster wrote.
The services provided by
Cloudflare and BitMitigate form a
key element of the Internet’s
backbone. They help sites boost
their speed, connect to users and
guard against vigilante strikes
such as distributed denial of serv-
ice, or DDoS, attacks, in which
hackers flood a site with traffic to
knock it offline.
For 8chan, a site that has at-
tracted no small number of online
enemies through its years of pro-
moting racist, sexist and offensive
content, those services have
helped ensure its survival. The
site is largely independent from
the advertising, hosting and tech-
nical giants that form the infra-
structure for other websites and
that can sometimes exert pres-
sure on objectionable clients.
While they were beginning the
shift to BitMitigate’s service early
Monday, 8chan’s administrators
said that viewers could expect
minimal downtime as servers up-
dated around the world, and they
called the rocky transition “just a
bump in the road.” The site’s
ria Sirbu, an executive at Voxility,
the tech firm that blocked 8chan
from the computer servers that
powered the site.
“Someone needs to get to the
core of [these] actions, and today
this someone happened to be us,”
she added. “Hopefully tomorrow
it will be someone else.”
The calls to close down 8chan
began within hours of the El Paso
shooting, when the site’s founder,
Fredrick Brennan, told The Wash-
ington Post that the site needed to
be shut down. On Sunday, the
online guardian service that had
long shielded 8chan from
cyberattacks abandoned it, and
the site disappeared, only to reap-
pear when another company
agreed to provide those services.
That’s when Voxility stepped in
and cut off its services to that
company.
The modern Internet is a baf-
fling maze of decentralized tech-
nical machines, each of them spe-
cialized to the task: domain regis-
trars to handle website names and
addresses; hosting services to
store and deliver data; security
firms to handle the flow of traffic
and defend against attack. A sin-
gle website can depend on dozens
of firms, all with differing policies,
business initiatives and moral
codes.
That interlocking dance often
plays out seamlessly behind the
scenes. But in rare cases such as
8chan’s, when public anger runs
high, the leaders of those special-
ized tools can react in unpredict-
able ways and find themselves
able to take action in the absence
of clear laws over how extremist
speech should be countered or
controlled.
U.S. regulators have stepped
carefully around the Internet’s fe-
ver swamps, worried about First
Amendment speech protections,
and U.S. law offers companies
strong protections from legal lia-
bility for the content their users
post. Some companies have also
been reluctant to closely police
content online in a way that
would open them to allegations of
heavy-handedness or censorship
or affect their bottom lines.
“This is an area when no one
really wants to take full responsi-
bility, so the issues get pushed
further and further down the tech
stack,” said Lindsay Gorman, a
fellow for emerging technology at
the advocacy group Alliance for
Securing Democracy.
“These takedowns end up be-
ing done on a case-by-case basis,
often when there’s public atten-
tion, as opposed to in a consistent
way,” she said. But that also means
that every website is only as se-
cure as its most vulnerable link:
“You have so many layers of the
Internet ecosystem and so many
levers to pull.”
One of 8chan’s most important
partners was Cloudflare, which
offers protections against site-
crippling attacks. Its decision to
drop 8chan on Sunday followed
months of outrage and was
capped by a day of public anguish
by the company’s chief, Matthew
Prince, who deemed the website a
“cesspool of hate.” It “won’t fix
hate online. It will almost certain-
ly not even remove 8chan from
the Internet,” Prince wrote in a
blog post. “But it is the right thing
to do.”
INTERNET FROM A
mass shootings in america
BY ABHA BHATTARAIWalmart said Monday that it
will not stop selling firearms or
change its open-carry policies,
even as advocacy groups and
workers voiced concerns about
fatal shootings at two of its stores
in the past week.
“There has been no change in
company policy,” spokesman
Randy Hargrove said in an inter-
view. “With this incident just
having happened over the week-
end, our focus has been on sup-
porting associates, customer and
the El Paso community.”
A man opened fire Saturday at
a shopping center in El Paso,
killing 20 people and injuring
dozens. Two more victims died
Monday, authorities said. Days
earlier, a Walmart employee in
Southaven, Miss., is alleged to
have fatally shot two co-workers.
“The entire Walmart commu-
nity is heartbroken,” chief execu-
tive Doug McMillon wrote on
Instagram in response to the
shootings. “I can’t believe I’m
sending a note like this twice in
one week.”
The retail giant offers guns in
about half of its 4,750 U.S. stores,
making it one of the nation’s
largest sellers of firearms and
ammunition. It requires store
employees to undergo active-
shooter training every three
months and allows shoppers to
carry firearms openly in cities
and states where that is legal.
“We follow all federal, state
and local regulations,” Hargrove
said. And, he added, “you’re not
going to see associates who are
armed during their shifts.”
Walmart, which has been sell-
ing guns for decades, has gradu-
ally tightened its policies in re-
cent years. It stopped selling
assault-style rifles in 2015 and
said it would focus instead on
firearms for hunting and sports.
Last year, it raised the minimum
age for gun and ammunition
purchases from 18 to 21, two
weeks after a mass shooting in
Parkland, Fla., left 17 dead at a
high school.
Some other high-profile retail-
ers took similar action at the
time, including Dick’s Sporting
Goods, which had sold a shotgun
to the suspect in Florida. The
company stopped selling assault-
style rifles and high-capacity
magazines at its Field & Stream
stores and called on lawmakers to
enact “common sense gun re-
form.”
“A number of people have said
to me that this had to be a really
hard decision,” Dick’s chief exec-
utive Edward Stack told The
Washington Post in May. “It wasnot.”
Advocacy groups and workers
say Walmart should do more to
curb gun violence. Guns Down
America, a nonprofit organiza-
tion that advocates for gun con-
trol policies, is calling on Wal-
mart to stop selling firearms and
to offer gun buybacks to its cus-
tomers. It also wants the retailer
to stop making contributions to
politicians who take money from
the National Rifle Association,
such as Sens. Marco Rubio (R-
Fla.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.).
“Walmart has a history of mov-
ing in the right direction, but
what happened in El Paso shows
they need to go further,” Execu-
tive Director Igor Volsky said.
“Walmart has such a big footprint
that it could make a big differ-
ence if wants to.”
Erin Rivkind, who works at the
customer service desk at a Wal-
mart in La Habra, Calif., said she
and her colleagues have been
rattled by the shootings. The
store where she works sells BB
guns and ammunition — and she
wishes it didn’t.
“A lot of us are on edge,” the
48-year-old said. “It’s sad, but I’m
looking around the store, think-
ing, where can I hide if some-
thing happens? We’re all afraid
we’re going to die.”
[email protected]Walmart keeps gun sales, policies
Internet firms dig in to keep site down
8/11/19.