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The Washington Post Asks: Should 8chan Be Considered a Terrorist Recuiting Site? (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: As most of the world condemned last week's mass shooting in New Zealand, a contrary story line emerged on 8chan, the online message board where the alleged shooter had announced the attack and urged others to continue the slaughter. "Who should i kill?" one anonymous poster wrote. "I have never been this happy," wrote another. "I am ready. I want to fight...." The persistence of the talk of violence on 8chan has led some experts to call for tougher actions by the world's governments, with some saying the site increasingly looks like the jihadi forums organized by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda...

8chan's founder, Fredrick Brennan, said Jim Watkins [8chan's sole administrator] owns other Internet businesses and has built a technical fortress to guard 8chan from potential takedowns: He owns nearly every component securing the site to the backbone of the Web, including its servers, which are scattered around the world. "You can send a complaint, but no one's going to do anything. He owns the whole operation," Brennan said. "It's how he keeps people confused and guessing...." Watkins is content to lose money, Brennan said, because he sees it as a pet project: "8chan is like a boat to Jim. It doesn't matter if it makes money. He just enjoys using it...."

8chan, however, is shielded in another way: the U.S. web-services giant Cloudflare, which helps websites guard against "distributed denial of service," or DDoS, attacks that online vigilante groups have used to target 8chan in the past.

The Post reports that Brennan "worries there are no true technical solutions beyond a total redesign of the Web, focused around identification and moderation, that could undermine it as a venue for free expression." Brennan tells the Post that "The Internet as a whole is not made to be censored. It was made to be resilient. And as long as there's a contingent of people who like this content, it will never go away."

On Tuesday, 8chan posted tips on Twitter for what to do "If your ISP is blocking a website you'd like to browse" -- a tweet which is now pinned to the top of its feed.

5 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Related question by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Informative

    Should the Washington Post be considered a terrorist recruiting site?

    Should Fox "News" or InfoWars be considered a terrorist recruiting sites? Seems more people have been incited to violence watching them. For example: Cesar Sayoc (mail bomber from FL), Edgar Welch (Pizzagate shooter from NC) ...

    https://www.washingtonpost.com...

    In March, conservative radio host and Infowars website operator Alex Jones apologized for promoting the Pizzagate conspiracy. Jones posted a six-minute video on his website in which he read a prepared statement saying that neither the restaurant nor its owner, James Alefantis, had anything to do with human trafficking. The statement came after Alefantis’s attorneys had requested a retraction.

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    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  2. Re:Oh lord I'd forgotten about Peterson by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1, Informative

    He's popular because he tells incels what they want to hear: it's not your fault, you really are owed sex and it's wrong for the world to deny it to you.

    Then some vague stuff about promoting monogamy that he refuses to be pinned down on but basically means making women desperate to get a man, any man, and then never leave him.

    Basically he's telling young guys that hot girls should dedicate themselves to pleasing them sexually. No wonder he's popular.

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    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re: Forgot the Censorship Icon by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a core part of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The "Global Elite" is just code for Jews.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Re:Oh lord I'd forgotten about Peterson by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've seen his videos, that's exactly what he is saying.

    I note that you don't actually state what he specifically is arguing. That's because you are not Jordan Peterson and not as good as him at avoiding being nailed down on specifics, and you know that if we get into this debate I'll push you until you can't avoid admitting it's what he is saying.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  5. Re:Yes. No. Sorta. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Informative

    PewDiePie is a well established alt-lite gateway. He was following a large number of alt-right people on YouTube until the terror attack, at which point he deleted them all. If it was nothing then why delete them?

    Come on, you can't be that naive. He subscribes to all those alt-right channels, has some of them on as guests, uses their rhetoric and language in his own videos (claiming it's a joke) and then follows them into the same history-scrubbing panic once the terror attack hits.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC