8chan Is a Megaphone for Gunmen. 'Shut the Site Down,' Says Its Creator.

[mia]

...Mr. Brennan, who has claimed that he got the idea for 8chan while on psychedelic mushrooms, set out to create what he called a free speech alternative to 4chan, a better-known online message board. He was upset that 4chan had become too restrictive, and he envisioned a site where any legal speech would be welcome, no matter how toxic.

The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of GamerGate — a loose reactionary collection of anti-feminist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan....

Since GamerGate, 8chan has become a catchall website for internet-based communities whose behavior gets them evicted from more mainstream sites. It hosts one of the largest gatherings of supporters of QAnon, who claim that there is an international bureaucracy plotting against the Trump administration. And it has been an online home for “incels,” men who lament being “involuntarily celibate,” and other fringe movements....

“If we kicked 8chan off our network, the crowds would cheer, and we’d suddenly not be in the middle of this horrible tragedy,” Mr. Prince said. “But law enforcement would have less visibility into what’s going on.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/technology/8chan-shooting-manifesto.html

[ismnotwasm]

1. Ah yes the gamergaters and the MRAs

We fucking told you all so

[mia]

3. MRAs

Had to look up MRA and found that stands for men's rights activism and that is an anti-feminist movement.

[Talitha]

6. They're 'anti-feminist' - until they want sex, food, or clean underpants.

[TDale313]

5. Yep.

Also that sexism and racism and homophobia are often intrinsically linked.

[Initech]

8. It's six degrees of assholism.

But unlike "6 Degrees Of Kevin Bacon", this game only has one degree, and everyone in it is an asshole.

[Cattledog]

2. Cloudfare is protecting them.

https://www.cloudflare.com

[mia]

4. "In 2017, Cloudflare shut off the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi hate site,

after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. After that decision, Cloudflare’s chief executive, Matthew Prince, expressed reservations about revoking the site’s protections, characterizing it as a “dangerous” precedent to set.

On Sunday, Mr. Prince said that he had spent hours since the El Paso shooting deliberating what to do about 8chan. He said that disabling the site’s Cloudflare protections could jeopardize law enforcement investigations, by removing a source of data about bad actors."

[DeminPennswoods]

7. Recently watched Frontline about, iirc, Phx's efforts to

stop sex trafficing. The undercover cops used backpage with good success for a lot of their information and leads. Once it was shut down, they've been having a harder time finding their targets because their targets have scattered to various other websites and are no longer mostly in one place.

I guess it comes down to wanting the roaches in the sunlight or under a rock.

[mia]

9. Cloudfare is kicking off 8chan

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212347970

[ecstatic]

10. "law enforcement would have less visibility into what's going on"

I used to be concerned about that, but now I'm of the opinion that every single one of those sites needs to be shut down. Period. Those sites are making it easy for the nationalist/nazi ideology to flourish. These sites are infecting generation Z and millennials, placing progress out of reach. Shut them all down. Make the angry trolls come out of their caves and meet in person. And we all know that ain't gonna happen. Shut them all down!

[flamingdem]

11. Isis was inhibited a lot by stopping it's online proliferation

We can do the same with white nationalist hate groups