Why Does 8chan Exist at All?
This past week, we experienced the third mass shooting to emerge from 8chan, an infamously vile message board, known most recently as an epicenter for the alt-right.
The shooting that took place in El Paso killed at least twenty. It was a copycat of the Christchurch massacre in March which was livestreamed on 8chan by a user who coated his weapons in 8chan memes. In June, a teenager on 8chan attempted to replicate the Christchurch killings at a Synagogue in Poway, California. He killed one worshiper and wounded many before his gun jammed.
These shootings are part of a larger pattern of alt-right killings, generally young men, motivated by fascist ideology they absorb online, or their imagined status as superfluous human beings on the bottom of society as so called “incels” (“involuntary celibates”), or both.
These include the killer of Heather Heyer at Charlottesville, a man who rammed a rental van into pedestrians in Toronto in 2017 “to speak to Sgt. 4chan,” (the site which 8chan copied), the perpetrator of the 2015 Charleston massacre, the Parkland shooter, and the 2014 Isla Vista “virgin” killer. But the list is far longer and stretches back a decade.
When the Christchurch shooting occurred, I had just finished a book on 4chan and 8chan and how they have spawned mass shootings and the alt-right.
