8chan, the extremist site on which the shooter posted a manifesto shortly before the attack, plays an important role in the investigation into the deadly shooting in the American city of El Paso. The committer of the attack on mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch in March was also inspired by 8chan. The messages on 8chan are sometimes so extreme that for a long time there have been calls to take the platform off the air. But sites like 8chan will never disappear: they are part of a toxic digital culture.
8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, launched 8chan in 2013 as an unlimited haven for freedom of speech. Today, more than ever, it is a breeding ground for extreme ideas flooded with sarcasm and cynicism, and where some mass murderers get inspiration for their atrocities. They are then celebrated by their “supporters”, and their act of terror gets an immortal digital life.
8chan is a message board, a bulletin board. Users can place messages in all kinds of channels -anoniem. Brennan launched the website in response to another, better known site, 4chan, where the channel “politically incorrect” (/pol/) is very popular, especially in right-wing extremist and so-called “alt right” circles.
Brennan thought that 4chan had become “too good and too limited” in what you could say. That’s when 8chan was born, where messages contain the most reprehensible, racist, sexist ideas that can be found online.
When the “outside world” falls over the tone of the messages it is laughed off as “edgy humour that is not understood”. It is often spoken in terms that only people who are part of the subculture understand. Concepts like “goobers”, “kikes”, “holohoax”, “redpilling” and dozens of other terms and ideas are used every day, but for the outside world it’s almost a different language.
“Our guy”
8chan really crawled out of the dark cellars of the internet for the first time and became known to the general public after the attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. The perpetrator of the attack on a mosque in which 52 people were killed posted a manifesto in which he explained his motives for his gruesome act.
Among other things, he talked about the conspiracy theory “The Great Replacement”, popular in right-wing circles, in which the indigenous white population is “replaced” by a coloured population. The manifesto and the ideas of the perpetrator were full of double standards and eventually it turned out that the attack in Christchurch was a “mass murder for and by the internet”, as the New York Times put it aptly. Immediately after the attack, the community honored its “hero” on 8chan.
Users of 8chan feel part of a group, a culture, where the rest of the world are outsiders. — Ico Maly
Users of 8chan feel part of a group, a culture, where the rest of the world is the outsiders. This was also immediately noticeable after the attack in New Zealand. “Although Brenton Tarrant explicitly said that he was not a member of a nationalist or political group, we must make sure that we do not label Tarrant as a ‘lone wolf’,” says Ico Maly, doctor of cultural sciences at Tilburg University.
“From a legal point of view, he acted alone. But the concept of a “lone wolf” goes hand in hand with associations of individuals who radicalize themselves and are isolated in society,” says Maly.
“In his text on 8chan, Tarrant constructs an identity for himself within a globally connected New Right and Extreme Right culture. If we analyse the announcement of his attack on 8chan, it becomes clear that he saw himself as “among friends” whom he not only knew, but with whom he also spent time. It does indeed seem that he has been a member of this online community for quite some time, as he himself says.”
After the shooting in El Paso, the attack was also commented on in detail on 8chan. Posters called the perpetrator ‘our guy’, our man. The manifesto he placed was quickly removed by 8chan’s moderators, but 8chan’s users kept sharing screenshots of it and that’s how it came to the attention of the public.
“The cesspool of the internet”
“On 8chan there is no form of social control nor of any decent content moderation”, says radicalisation expert Olivier Cauberghs. “The website grew into a gathering place for internet users from the right-wing extremist ideological spectrum of “alt-right” to “white supremacists”. The users of the “boards” (the channels), who, in contrast to 4chan, can make their own channels, constantly create boards with extremist slogans such as “It’s ok to be white” and swastikas.
Cauberghs: “8chan is also a gathering place where actions are set up to counter what users call the “culture Marxist”, “mainstream media”. A victim of this is Netflix, which was renamed “Jewflix” on 8chan because of the diversity of people who are featured in the programs.”
“The interracial relationships that occur in series such as Sex Education, for example, further strengthen the vision of the 8-channers. The result is an appeal to go to the trailer of the program on YouTube and leave negative comments. This can strongly influence public opinion by normalizing racist comments, precisely because people are unconsciously exposed to them on a large scale.
“8chan is the cesspool of the Internet,” says computer scientist Jeroen Baert, “but at the same time I am also convinced that there is a kind of nihilism among many users. I think that many people also post ‘because it’s possible’, that people post extreme things there that they don’t support so much, but because it can be said there. The world of 8chan is extremely complex. Other people post messages on it just because of the kick they get when they see their message appear in the so called ‘classic’ media that report about it.”
Just for us the reason too, by the way, not to publish screenshots of the site here.
Clubhouses of extreme ideas
After the attack in Christchurch, there was a great call to take 8chan offline. But the company Cloudflare, which helped maintain the safety of the site, did not intervene. They do now, after the deadly shooting in El Paso. As a result, the site is offline. In 2015, Google removed references to 8chan from the search results.
Research should show whether the shooter in El Paso was intertwined with the online culture of 8chan, or whether he only used the site to post his manifesto. The ideas he put down about “the replacement of one’s own people” can no longer be found only on sites like 8chan; it’s a narrative that can also be found on social media like Facebook and Twitter.
Just like the “Hispanic invasion”, which the shooter talks about in his manifesto. The American researcher Nathalie Martinez found a concept that is also used by the American president Trump in at least 2200 advertisements on Facebook. This does not mean that the president — like other prominent voices in American politics — had a direct influence on the shooter. But can it also be ruled out altogether?
Research by the New York Times recently revealed that Anders Breivik’s attack in Norway in 2011, in which 77 people died, affected others. The shooter of the attack in Christchurch explicitly referred to Breivik. The shooter in El Paso referred to Christchurch. What these three men have in common is that they were not killed by the police and that certainly Breivik and Tarrant continue to spread their extreme ideas in court.
After the attack in Christchurch, we already wrote that the attack itself was not only an end in itself, but also a means of spreading radical ideas further: a bloody attack that can live on online in memes, among other things, and that serves to normalise radical ideas.
The success of 8chan lies in the lack of moderation
“The success of 8chan lies in the lack of moderation,” adds Cauberghs. Because Twitter and Facebook are heavily committed to so-called “content moderation”, they mainly post messages that are just within Facebook’s terms and conditions.
The consequences of repeated violations of Facebook’s policy lead to suspension and deletion, as a result of which users have to create a new profile. Users on Facebook and Twitter receive an ultimate last warning and they become more reluctant to post extreme messages that have been accepted on 8chan. These “inconveniences” are not there on sites like 4chan and 8chan, due to lack of content moderation, and making this the path of least resistance.
Sites like 8chan are the clubhouses of the past, where extreme ideas were shared with others and where like-minded people found and boosted each other. But online there are no borders, and technology and the mass media make it possible for this kind of ideology to spread rapidly around the world. A site like 8chan may be — temporarily — inaccessible, but a new place is emerging where it can thrive.
And if not, then there are still the lesser-known platforms like Gab or Discord, where extreme ideas, left and right, continue to proliferate. This will not end here and now.
