8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now

[dalton99a]

https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/el-paso-8chan-4chan-mass-shootings-manifesto.html

8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now
Three white-nationalist shooters appear to have posted manifestos on the same troll forum. Here’s how 8chan became a meme-filled refuge for hate.
By April Glaser
Aug 04, 20191:11 AM

....

Before 8chan and 4chan, there was Stormfront, a message board created by Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black in 1996. For more than a decade Stormfront was the most popular white supremacist website on the web. 4chan, founded in 2003, had become fashionable among the generally left-leaning online activists Anonymous, who were known for launching online trolling campaigns against those they politically disagreed with. There, the /pol/ message board (short for “politically incorrect”) attracted users who enjoyed trolling people with jokes about Nazis and racist tropes. Around 2012, Stormfront users reportedly noticed an opportunity to make 4channers “racially aware,” and that year, a “Redpill instruction pamphlet” to indoctrinate 4chan trolls began circulating on 4chan, according to a report in Rolling Stone. Andrew Anglin, who founded the influential neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer, once said that 4chan is where he “got into Hitler.” Anglin later teamed up with Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, an infamous neo-Nazi troll who led vicious doxing campaigns against women, and the two helped to pioneer a meme-ified style of spreading hate that remains popular on 4chan and 8chan and across the fringe-right web today: make lots of jokes about the Holocaust and other genocides, desensitizing people to extreme hate-based violence.

If 4chan’s /pol/ could get pretty bad, 8chan became a destination for the very worst. The board was founded in the U.S. by Fredrick Brennan after 4chan’s owners decided to ban threads about the online harassment campaign Gamergate. While 4chan has a virtually nonexistent moderation policy, it does have rules against posting anyone’s personal information, like home addresses and phone numbers. 8chan doesn’t even have that. Whatever is too gruesome for 4chan finds a home on 8chan. That now includes enthusiasm for a white ethnostate. 8chan, now based in the Philippines, has “less restrictive moderation policies” than almost anywhere else on the internet, which has led it to become a “naturally more transgressional space,” than anywhere else on the internet, according to Benjamin T. Decker, the founder of Memetica, a digital investigations consultancy.

Many people come to the politically incorrect boards of 4chan and 8chan from video-game communities, where players looking to laugh at an abasing joke or chat about violent games without offending anyone can find friends. The forums are rife with in-jokes in which users routinely blur the lines between actually believing in Nazism and laughing about it. After the Poway shooter’s manifesto appeared, posters on 8chan wrote that the killer should try to “get the high score” and kill a larger number of people than the Chistchurch shooter did.

8chan isn’t only a place where people find community in their hate, but it is where they go when they want to announce mass murder to an online army that can help spread their message. Even when 8chan’s owners do feel compelled to step in—in a rarity, the suspected El Paso shooter’s original thread appears to have been removed—that army will have already gotten to work. The manifesto has been reposted again and again and again. The playbook worked.

[Eugene]

1. 8chan founder calls for site to be shut down. - WaPo

Three mass shootings this year began with a hateful screed on 8chan. Its founder calls it a terrorist refuge in plain sight.

The message board’s ties to mass violence have fueled worries over how to combat a Web-fueled wave of racist bloodshed. The El Paso shooting also prompted the site’s founder to urge its owners to “do the world a favor and shut it off.”

“Once again, a terrorist used 8chan to spread his message as he knew people would save it and spread it,” Fredrick Brennan, who founded 8chan in 2013 but stopped working with the site’s owners in December, told The Washington Post. “The board is a receptive audience for domestic terrorists.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-mass-shootings-this-year-began-with-hateful-screed-chan-its-founder-calls-it-terrorist-refuge-plain-sight/

[dalton99a]

2. +1. It's clear the manifesto posted to 8chan is genuine

It's clear the manifesto posted to 8chan is genuine. It contains details no
one else could have known, and the Guardian reports:¹

> Investigators are “reasonably confident” that the Walmart shooting suspect
> posted the document on 8chan, an extremist online message board that often
> features racist content.

Conspiracy theorists and 8chan apologists are already tweeting at me that it's
fake. It is not fake. That's my comment. Once again a terrorist used 8chan to
spread his message as he knew people would save it and spread it, and that the
board is a receptive audience for domestic terrorists.

If you want point-by-point evidence why it's real, here you go:

* The manifesto contains exactly the correct "gear" (murder weapons) used in
the shooting.
* The name of the shooter was not even known yet, yet the manifesto was titled
"P._Crusius_-_Notification_Letter.pdf"²
* The manifesto contains exactly the correct motivation for the shooting, i.e.
bigotry against Latinos.
* We can see that the file name of the shooter's manifesto, as reported by
8chan's software, (I wrote this feature, so I should know what I'm talking
about!), is 7de586dfe57c3730dcdbdaa9657e6a1e843f26843e840985e8d7b70f50e3fd4e.²
It is named "P. Crusius". It was posted at 16:25 UTC, even before the first
EMS call. It was archived by Wayback at 18:54 UTC (when the shooting started
hitting the news and some 8chan user pushed "archive" ).³ It is IMPOSSIBLE for
a troll to have uploaded a fake manifesto later. 8chan uses a very strong
hashing algorithm.

Don't let them tell you it's fake. It's not fake, it's real. Don't let them
attempt damage control.

Best,
Fred Brennan

[LessAspin]

3. "Shut the site down,"

Link to tweet