Where does online hate speech start: at the bottom of society or at the top?

Once again, the debate turns to banning websites that promote hate speech: in 2017 it was the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer and now it’s 8chan, created by Fredrick Brennan in October 2013 as “a free-speech-friendly” alternative to 4chan, and now under scrutiny for its central role in the radicalization and publication of information related to recent mass shootings in the United States and other countries. After disassociating himself from the page in December 2018 after the Christchurch massacre and the killer’s publication on it of videos of the shooting, Brennan said it should be closed and that “a lot of these sites cause more misery than anything else”.

After verifying that the author of the massacre in El Paso over the weekend had announced his intentions on 8chan before killing 20 people, the site is now inaccessible, after Cloudflare, which provides DNS services and DDoS protection for a number of other controversial sites, decided to discontinue its services to the page. The page has long been excluded from the Google index after it was found to have published child pornography and although it maintains its domain because its registrar, Tucows, will not withdraw it until it receives a judicial request to do so, everything indicates that it will soon disappear to most intents and purposes.