In the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, over the first weekend of August, internet domain masking service Cloudflare cut ties with the anonymous web forum 8chan, citing its role in radicalizing white supremacist extremists.
The El Paso shooting suspect was at least the third person in 2019 to announce a shooting on 8chan prior to the actual event. Prior to this, the individuals accused of mass shootings at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March and Poway Synagogue in San Diego in April both posted manifestos to 8chan attempting to justify and amplify their actions.
Both the Christchurch and Poway manifestos were steeped in the meme-heavy language of white supremacists on 8chan and its older cousin 4chan — a.k.a. the use of “shitposting” and ironic language used to mask the sincerity of the beliefs behind the language. The El Paso shooting manifesto was devoid of the same rhetorical style of masking its real aims in joking, mocking hyperbole, but it was laden with similar white extremist ideology.
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Cloudflare was a DDoS protection service for 8chan, which went offline following the company’s announcement; however, it was soon back up and running as of publication time, with its mottos of “Embrace infamy” and “Welcome to 8chan, the Darkest Reaches of the Internet,” unchanged.
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8chan’s URL and domain name have been registered by a different company, Tucows. Public scrutiny of Tucows has increased, along with that of Amazon, which sells audiobook content owned by 8chan’s owner Jim Watkins.
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A spokesperson for Tucows told the New York Times that the company’s leaders had “no immediate plans” to shut off the website’s domain access, “other than to keep discussing internally.” However, some eagle-eyed domain watchers have noted that 8chan seems to have switched domain registrars from Tucows to the alt-right friendly registrar Epik, whose CEO Rob Monster funded the alt-right-centered social media platform Gab after multiple tech companies end their relationship with it.
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Meanwhile, Epik’s own backend services may be getting hobbled due to action taken by another service provider, Voxility. As noted by Stanford tech authority Alex Stamos, Epik seems to be renting most of its services from Voxility, which summarily suspended service Monday afternoon to Epik’s domain registrar company, Bitmitigate.
Vox
Investigators are examining a screed believed to have been posted online by the suspect in Saturday's fatal shooting at a Texas shopping mall an hour before the attack, senior law enforcement officials say.
Investigators are “reasonably confident” that the suspect, identified by police as Patrick Wood Crusius, 21, of Texas, posted the diatribe on the extremist online forum 8chan before the shooting.
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The screed posted to the anonymous extremist message board railed against immigrants in Texas and pushed talking points about preserving European identity in America.
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The document criticized both Democrats and Republicans and expressed anti-government and anti-corporate views. The author claimed to have developed those beliefs before Trump’s presidency.
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An initial attempt to upload the document occurred at 10:15 a.m., but was unsuccessful. The document was then uploaded a few minutes later. At 10:39 the first emergency calls reached 911.
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The writing presented itself as a low-cost model for deadly attacks and envisioned the actions as part of a larger ideological war.
The document was deleted from one of 8chan's forums after the shooting began, but forum users archived the post, which contained a link to a PDF version.
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Users on the 8chan forum where the note appeared frequently write about their belief in a coming race war, plus anti-immigrant, racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. White nationalist literature, slogans and images are mainstays. User posts on the message board following the incident referred to the suspect as a "martyr."
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The first reply to the posting was “Hello FBI.”
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Law enforcement was already analyzing the document before the mass shooting began and had connected it to a person, but the writing didn't name a target, time, place or use the suspect's name.
NBC
Also from Crusius' "manifesto":
It does seem telling that he feels the need to try to clear Trump.
UPDATE:
If you care about these issues, here is my House Homeland Security testimony on countering online extremism (PDF): fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/st… Here is the election security report I was proud to contribute to (PDF): electionreport.stanford.eduv
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