8Chan goes offline as online service withdraws service after El Paso shooting
Only moments before a shooter entered a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, and shot dead 20 people and injuring many more, he turned to online forum 8Chan to post his hate filled so-called “manifesto” pertaining to racism and white supremacy.
The reason the shooter used 8Chan is that it is a website that is largely unmoderated, where everything and anything goes. The site is an offshoot and more extremist version of 4Chan, and is comprised of many user-created boards related to particular themes. The creators moderate their own boards, with no moderation from the site administration. It is one of the only large websites that have a near-no moderation policy, and as such is a website that attracts extremists, who can post all sorts of content with little fear that it will be taken down.
The man who attacked two mosques in Christchurch uploaded links to his disturbing videos to 8Chan as well as his own racist screed. The same happened again in April 2019 during a shooting at a synagogue in California.
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Google no longer list 8Chan webpages in its index due to the controversial nature of its content including links to child pornography.
It is perhaps no surprise then that 8Chan is a very controversial website, and one that needs protection from cyber-attacks. A popular type of cyber-attack that would inevitably befall such a controversial site is called a DDOS attack, or distributed denial-of-service attack. This is where the attacker uses a network of computers – often computers infected with malware to put them under the attacker’s control – to send large amounts of useless data to the web server of a target website, causing the web server’s resources to become overwhelmed and consequently prevent legitimate visitors form getting to the website.
Websites can use online tools to prevent such attacks from happening. One such service is provided by Cloudflare that helps websites vet their incoming traffic to prevent such attacks. Cloudflare works like having a security guard at your front door who can turn away unwanted visitors or visitors looking to cause you harm.
However Cloudflare announced that they were withdrawing their services from 8Chan due to their role in mass shootings. This in turn would leave the site vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Following the decision, the Cloudflare blog read in part –
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. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.
And as expected, soon after Cloudflare withdrew its services, 8Chan went offline, though it is unclear if it was the result of a cyber attack or the owners took the site offline themselves.
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However its downtime is likely to be shortlived. As Cloudflare also noted, sites that have their services withdrawn are likely to seek out Cloudflare’s competitors, and reports suggest the site has already signed up for the services of Bitmitigate, which hosts a number of other hate websites, including at least one other that had previously been banned from Cloudflare.
As such, it is unlikely that such websites are really going to go away anytime soon.
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