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The mass shooting at the El Paso Walmart was an act of white supremacist domestic terrorism. It was also an act that was incubated, fomented, and shared through 8chan. 8chan is a message board that hosts, more or less, the very worst humanity has to offer, and amplifies their messages.
Finally, Cloudflare, a web-infrastructure company, has kicked 8chan off their platform. From the Washington Post:
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, a firm that protects sites from cyber attacks, said he decided to drop 8chan because it “has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.”
“We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design,” Prince said in a blog post about his decision. “8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.”
On the one hand, we don’t really want “deep-web” infrastructure tech-bros making decisions on what people can or cannot see. On the other hand, sites like 8chan give aide and comfort to terrorists. If ISIS organized on 8chan like white domestic terrorists do, it would have been de-platformed a long time ago. It’s really not a hard call, once you call the terrorism this site promotes by its name.
Unfortunately, it only makes a small dent in the problem. Prince himself is aware of this:
“While we’ve been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it,” Prince wrote. “Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions.”…
“While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online,” Prince wrote. “It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate. In taking this action we’ve solved our own problem, but we haven’t solved the Internet’s.”
I appreciate Prince’s humility here. At core, we have a legal problem with guns, white supremacy, and domestic terrorism, not a tech problem with the ability of these forces to organize. It really shouldn’t be Prince’s responsibility to do what law makers will not.
That said, everybody has to do what they can to combat this violence. What I’m going to need from Prince and Cloudflare is not just to deplatform 8chan, but to immediately deplatform 16chan, 64chan, √2chan, or whatever the hell pops up next as white supremacy training videos marked as a power-leveling through Super Mario Odyssey.
‘A cesspool of hate’: U.S. web firm drops 8chan after El Paso shooting [Washington Post]