8chan was kicked offline after the site hosted the manifesto posted by the El Paso shooter. Photo credit: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images
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8chan is in trouble. After being kicked offline on August 4 when internet infrastructure company Cloudflare dropped it as a customer, the firm was yesterday scrambling to get itself back up and running.
At first, it succeeded. On August 5, 8chan confirmed it would be using another service provider for online protection: Epik.com. The reasons for choosing Epik.com were clear: The firm says it’s a “non-discriminatory provider” and has “a proven commitment to liberty.” In other words: It doesn’t care about the content you host.
And Epik’s background is extremely shady. The firm recently bought BitMitigate, the security company that neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer now uses after being dropped by Cloudflare in 2017. Epik is also the registrar for Gab.com–the site dumped by GoDaddy after it was used by the terrorist who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October last year.
But choosing Epik didn’t keep the 8chan site up for long. Epik itself relies on an infrastructure provider called Voxility–which has cut ties with the firm after learning about its new dubious customer. 8chan is currently offline.
Also yesterday, Tucows, the internet services company, said it will no longer register the domain of extreme forum 8chan after a gunman posted a hate-filled manifesto on the site just minutes before killing 22 people in El Paso on Saturday.
It is a difficult call: Should infrastructure providers be deciding which sites are and are not allowed to exist online? But at the same time, firms have their reputations to consider. As Ian Thornton Trump, security head at AmTrust International told me yesterday, content delivery networks like Cloudflare “have a responsibility to society.” Meanwhile, a brand can be damaged “by association to distasteful and inappropriate content.”
At the same time, the content hosted by 8chan is so despicable that even its creator Fredrick Brennan wants the site shut down due to the way it’s being run by its current administrators.
“Shut the site down,” Brennan told the New York Times. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”
8chan: Onto the dark web
If 8chan doesn’t find a provider to replace Cloudflare and Epik, it’s possible that it will be kicked offline permanently–at least on the so called “clear web”, which is hacker speak for the “normal” internet.
Benjamin T Decker, CEO of the digital investigations consultancy Memetica told U.K. news site the Guardian that his research showed a discussion among followers of 8chan of moving the platform to the dark web.
The right to free speech versus protection against hate is certainly a difficult subject to approach, says Lisa Forte, partner at Red Goat Cyber Security. “Shutting down forums like 8chan is likely to drive the problem underground onto the wild west that is the dark web.”
However, she also thinks society should be protected from inappropriate and hateful content. “I believe that anonymity plays a huge part in our online behaviour–people feel free to say anything when their identity is hidden. Perhaps the platforms need to start requiring proof of identity to start an account.
“Perhaps people would be more responsible if they thought their hurtful and dangerous comments could be traced back to them. It is hard to defend forums that permit such dangerous discussions but it does make you question just how ‘free’ we actually want free speech to be.”
Of course, forcing 8chan underground would make it more difficult for the average user to stumble on this content. But it could also mean hateful sites are able to proliferate further and are more difficult to monitor. It could make the issue a whole lot worse.
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