The Dark History of 8chan
I'm hideously fascinated by 8chan, the alt-right and what is essentially the rise of the new fascism. I'm not sure we would be in the position we are now without social media and the unlimited free speech provided by roiling swamps like 8chan. We live in a world where extreme and often thoroughly vile viewpoints used to be kept under wraps due to social constraints. Now those same viewpoints can easily and anonymously be posted to people with similarly extreme viewpoints, and the effect of this group as a whole has definitely started jarring the real world. And not in a good way. Read "It Came From Something Awful" if you want get more of the picture, and thanks to WIRED for this article.
Fredrick Brennan is a vivid dreamer, and toward the end of his time running the notorious website 8chan, one sequence would play out in his mind night after night as he slept.
Brennan, wheelchair-bound from a genetic disorder, dreamed that he was being hauled away by police and locked behind bars while dressed in an orange jumpsuit. “In my waking life, I could rationalize that that would never happen,” he says. But at night, in his dreams, denying the risks of operating the site he built and obsessively defended for years through a combination of slippery deflections, free-speech absolutism, and personal attacks was “getting harder and harder.”
Brennan, 25, is telling me about the days he spent running 8chan while living in a small studio apartment some 20 stories above the sprawl of Manila, far from New York where he began building the site as he came down from a psychedelic mushroom trip in 2013.
Brennan was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, more commonly referred to as brittle bone disease. His arms and legs are severely bowed from the condition, which, he says, also afflicts his mother and younger brother. He has, by his own tally, suffered dozens of broken bones over his life.
Many of the photos of Brennan found online are screenshots pulled from a documentary made about him, a portion of which was filmed when he was 19 at his then-home while he was dressed in bright blue and red Super Mario pajamas. A lava lamp and a stuffed Mario mushroom in the background, he appears considerably younger, barely a teenager.
But when Brennan’s wife opens the door to his apartment on an afternoon earlier this year, two small dogs pinging excitedly across the tiled floor and around his electric wheelchair, he looks far older. A pair of glasses sit slightly crooked on his face. He jokes about the weight he has gained since moving to the Philippines in 2014, where he lives in part because of the cheaper cost of living compared to the United States.
Brennan split fully with the current owner of 8chan last year, but even in this new phase of his life—wife and dogs and all—his role as the gatekeeper of one of the internet’s most controversial sites remains etched on the public record. That association catapulted him into the international media spotlight again and again, most recently last weekend in the wake of two mass shootings in the US—one in El Paso, Texas, the other in Dayton, Ohio.
The El Paso shooter posted an anti-immigration manifesto on 8chan minutes before he opened fire on people in a WalMart not far from the US-Mexico border. Its customers are largely immigrants, people of Hispanic descent, and visitors from across the border. Twenty-two were killed and more than two dozen wounded. In Dayton, nine died and 27 were wounded.
Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that provides content delivery services and protection against denial-of-service attacks across the internet, cut service with 8chan on Sunday, following the attack. The company’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said he was nervous about the decision, but that the site was considered a “problematic user," for a long time.
After Cloudfare’s decision, 8chan briefly found refuge with another provider but was quickly offline again. The site’s current administrator, an American named Ronald Watkins, said in a string of tweets that he was working on getting the site back online. “We have mitigations going up and strategies are being developed to bring services back online. Doing my best to #StayTheCourse,” he said.
Ronald Watkins’ father, Jim Watkins, who owns the site, on Tuesday addressed 8chan’s recent troubles in a YouTube video. Speaking in front of an image of Benjamin Franklin, with taps playing in the background, Watkins denies that the El Paso shooter uploaded his manifesto to 8chan and says it was posted by another person.
He goes on to complain that 8chan is being treated unfairly. “It is actually sinister behavior,” Watkins says of being kicked offline, a decision he attributes to Cloudfare’s upcoming IPO. “Ours is one of the last independent companies that offer a place you may write down your thoughts free from having to worry about whether they are offensive to one group or the other.” He ends by calling Cloudflare’s actions “cowardly” and “not thought out.” (After some preliminary emails, Watkins declined to be interviewed by WIRED.)
Also on Tuesday the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to Jim Watkins demanding that he appear to answer questions about 8chan's extremist content.
For his part, Brennan was delighted to see that the site he created had been knocked off line. He hopes it’s permanent. “If this is not the end, maybe there will be another shooting and that will be the end,” Brennan told me in an interview Tuesday morning. “I just hope that they give up and throw in the towel. It is time.” He continued, “The only people that are really going to suffer are mass shooters that wanted to post on 8chan because they knew people would archive their stuff. So they will have to find another way. Boo hoo.”