8chan Criticized By Its Founder, Blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs (marketwatch.com)

Several major ISPs in Australia temporarily blocked access to 8chan, along with "dozens" of web sites that hosted video of last week's mass shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, Ars Technica reports -- noting that the ISPs acted on their own in response to "community expectations."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....

Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...

"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."

Comments

This is what happens

[PopeRatzo]

You 8chan edgelords who think death threats, racism, child porn, etc are the height of clever discourse can only blame yourselves for this. At some point, people will say, "enough" and just shut you the fuck down. So now you spoil things for the rest of us who believe in free speech.

Good job. You run with scissors, don't cry when someone gets their eye put out.

Re:This is what happens

[MightyMartian]

Do your parents know you're insane?

I think the point is to keep it away from

[rsilvergun]

regular folk. Get a room full of 100 random people and I'd be surprised you could find one who's heard of 8chan before the shootings. If you did, it was probably because of that stunt THQ Nordic pulled with them (no such thing as bad advertising...).

And if I may, censorship has it's up side, especially when it's not done by the government. It makes content creators work harder to get their message out because they can't just rely on shock value. It discourages writers from relying on sex and violence and bigger and bigger explosions. The 70s and 80s were pretty well censored and they were a golden age for films (Star Wars, the Mel Brooks films, The God Father).

Take all the breaks off and you don't get a "free marketplace of ideas", you get a bevy of trolls and their shit posts. And as the discourse gets more and more toxic you get this.

Re:free and anonymous connectivity is not the prob

[ClickOnThis]

It is the solution...

I reluctantly agree, but only to a point.

For an alcoholic, alcohol is not the solution. But neither is prohibition.

People who cloister themselves in the toxic world-views of sites like 8chan may be heavily conditioned against considering facts from other sites. Free and anonymous connectivity probably will not help such people. But I don't think ISPs banning 8chan will help either. Some other site will take its place, or the 8channer can switch ISPs.

Another topic is whether ISPs should be able to do this in the first place. I think they should not. IMHO, ISPs are common carriers. They provide a connection service, not a content service (like cable or satellite TV, that choose which content to provide.)

I think the solution is to teach young people how to spot false arguments and misinformation, as well as the history of the world, and the harm that extremist groups have caused.