The Washington Post - 05.08.2019

MONDAY, AUGUST 5 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

Mass shootings in America

BY DREW HARWELL

The El Paso massacre began
like the fatal attacks earlier this
year at mosques in New Zealand
and a San Diego-area synagogue:
with a racist manifesto and an-
nouncement on the anonymous
message board 8chan, one of the
Web’s most venomous refuges for
extremist hate.
Like after the shootings in
Christchurch and the Chabad of
Poway synagogue, the El Paso
attack was celebrated on 8chan:
One of the most active threads
early Sunday urged people to
create memes and original con-
tent, or OC, that could make it
easier to distribute and “celebrate
the [gunman’s] heroic action.”
“You know what to do!!! Make
OC, Spread OC, Share OC, Inspire
OC,” an anonymous poster wrote.
“Make the world a better place.”
The message board’s ties to
mass violence have powered con-
cerns over how to combat an
Internet-fueled wave of racist
bloodshed. The El Paso shooting
also prompted the site’s founder
to urge its owners to “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,” Fredrick Brennan, who
founded 8chan in 2013 but
stopped working with the site’s
owners in December, told The
Washington Post. “The board is a
receptive audience for domestic
terrorists.”
Twenty people were killed in a
shooting at an El Paso shopping
center on Saturday. Police believe
the suspected gunman posted a
jumbled and racist screed to
8chan minutes before the shoot-
ing that ranted against a “Hispan-
ic invasion.”
Nine people were killed in a
separate attack in Dayton, Ohio,
early Sunday morning, hours af-
ter the El Paso shooting. It’s
unclear whether that shooter or
attack had any connection to
8chan.
The El Paso shooting, some
terrorism experts said, could
ratchet up pressure on federal
law enforcement and govern-
mental authorities seeking to
combat a site that calls itself “the
darkest reaches of the Internet.”
The site has survived, extrem-
ism experts said, in part due to a
reluctance from some law-en-
forcement and intelligence offi-
cials to categorize white-suprem-
acist and far-right movements as
terrorism threats. For years,
8chan has been shielded by U.S.
laws that limit websites’ legal
liability for what their users post
and has been further protected by
an Internet infrastructure that
makes it difficult to take sites
down.
Some online researchers also
fear that a shutdown of 8chan

would only spur hate groups to

organize elsewhere. The site’s

leaders have appeared embold-

ened in the face of criticism,

adding a message in recent

months at the top of its homep-

age: “Embrace infamy.”

The site is registered as a prop-

erty of the Nevada-based compa-

ny N.T. Technology and owned by

Jim Watkins, an American Web

entrepreneur living in the Philip-

pines. Asked for comment, Wat-

kins replied with a single sen-

tence: “I hope you are well.”

Watkins has declined inter-

view requests after each mass

shooting linked to 8chan. Follow-

ing the Christchurch massacre,

he released a video defending

8chan as a refuge for free speech

online and referring to the shoot-

er as a criminal alien.

Watkins’s son Ron, who over-

sees the site, did not respond to

requests for comment. He has

mocked the idea that 8chan could

do more to stop mass violence,

tweeting in April: “Deletion with-

in minutes is not enough, appar-

ently.”

After the Chabad of Poway

shooting in April, 8chan’s Twitter

account blamed the news media

for publicizing the crime and said

the suspected shooter’s post was

taken down nine minutes after

creation. But the board regularly

allows posters afterward to pro-

mote the shooting, spew hateful

comments and cheer on further

violence to beat the last attack’s

body count, or “high score.”

The suspect wrote before the

attack that he had been visiting

8chan for “a year and a half, yet

what I’ve learned here is price-

less. It’s been an honor.”

Joan Donovan, the director of

the Te chnology and Social

Change Research Project at Har-

vard University’s Shorenstein

Center, said posting to 8chan

before a mass shooting has be-

come a “tactical” way for attack-

ers to gain attention and amplify

their message.

“Mass shooters can control the

public conversation about their

motives, while at the same time

provide the public with a clear

explanation for their actions,”

Donovan said.

She pointed to the pattern that

has developed in the

Christchurch, Poway and El Paso

shootings: “1. Post a racist screed.

2. Carry out racist violence. 3.
   Inspire others to do the same.”
   She said the manifestos “are be-
   coming more instructive than
   they are explanatory. This has me
   very worried that targeted vio-
   lence will become a meme itself.”
   Shooters post their manifestos
   to 8chan, Brennan said, because
   the audience there celebrates rac-
   ist, anti-Semitic and white-su-
   premacist violence; moderation
   is nearly nonexistent; and it has a
   “morbid record of success for
   maximum spread.”
   Clint Watts, a senior fellow at
   the Foreign Policy Research Insti-
   tute and a former FBI counterter-
   rorism expert, said 8chan mirrors
   the role other fringe sites play in
   international terrorism, allowing
   “one-off extremists to connect

and catalyze their operations.”

The 8chan board, he said, “has

become the place where white-

nationalist extremists and any-

one wanting to perpetrate vio-

lence can congregate, radicalize,

plot attacks and share manifes-

tos,” he said. “The increased inter-

connection between what would

otherwise be lone actors acceler-

ates the pace of attacks and their

lethality.”

The FBI, he added, “needs the

legislation and resources to pur-

sue these inspired attacks the way

they did international terrorism

since 9/11.” He urged the federal

government to designate white-

nationalist-inspired violence a

domestic terrorism threat, which

would allow the FBI to more

closely assess calls to violence

arising from 8chan and similar

sites.

The FBI said in a statement in

March that “individuals often are

radicalized by looking at propa-

ganda on social media sites and

in some cases may decide to carry

out acts of violence” but that the

bureau “only investigates matters

in which there is a potential

threat to national security or a

possible violation of federal law.”

In A pril, the FBI filed a warrant

to search 8chan’s Nevada office,

seeking information on the Pow-

ay suspect’s activity and respons-

es to his post.

The site, Brennan said, is kept

online largely as a vanity project

for Watkins and makes very little

money, helping shield it from

advertiser or public pressure. The

site does not work with main-

stream digital-ad networks but

sells space directly to companies

and solicits donations, which,

Brennan says, probably earn

8chan about $100 a month.

The site protects itself from

legal threats by removing copy-

righted content but allows practi-

cally everything else without lim-

its. Its servers, Brennan said, are

distributed around the world,

making it more difficult to take

down. A year ago, 8chan said that

it had nearly 8 million users visit

every month.

Pressure, however, is building

on mainstream companies that

help keep 8chan online. Cloud-

flare, a San Francisco-based firm

that helps Web companies defend

against cyberattacks, has contin-

ued to work with 8chan, saying it

serves websites regardless of

their content.

The activist group Sleeping Gi-

ants tweeted about Cloudflare’s

connection early Sunday: “If

you’re doing business with a site

that helps people spread violent,

racist ideologies, you are just as

culpable. Full stop.”

Cloudflare’s general counsel,

Douglas Kramer, told The Post on

Sunday that the company had no

short-term plans to change

8chan’s services, even though it

explicitly bans terro-

rist-propaganda networks.

The company, Kramer said, is

involved in discussions at the

government level over how to

police or regulate similar sites.

But he said he worried dropping

the shield on 8chan would be

tantamount to encouraging “cy-

ber-vigilantism.”

“Inserting ourselves as the

judge and jury on these things is

very problematic,” he said. “It’s

easy for folks to approach us with

one website, but for us, we need

to come up with a rule that we can

apply to over 20 million different

web properties.”

[email protected]

‘Shut it off,’ founder says as 8chan applauds El Paso attack

Website’s mass-violence

content stokes fears over

Internet-fueled hate

MD MHIC # 1176 | VA # 2 701039723 | DC # 2 242

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