49 people were killed in Christchurch, New Zealand after a gunman opened fire inside two mosques on Friday. In addition to the 49 killed, at least 40 others were injured. The main suspect in the shootings is 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, a white man from Australia. New Zealand’s prime minister has accurately described the horror as a “terrorist attack.”
This brutal act of violence clearly had its roots in xenophobia and racism. Why? We’ll unpack all of it, with a particular focus on what 8chan (seemingly) has to do with this abhorrent violence.
Posts from the alleged shooter appeared on a website known as “8chan” before the deadly attack. Links to a Facebook live stream of the attack were included in these posts. The live stream of the massacre, narrated by the shooter, was 17 minutes long. After being contacted by the police, Facebook removed the poster’s accounts.
A 74-page manifesto called “The Great Replacement” also appeared on 8chan and Twitter. Both the live stream and this manifesto have made moves around other social media, like WhatsApp, reddit, and YouTube, since the massacre.
(Note: These materials are not linked or embedded in this diary.)
Tarrant allegedly posted to the 8chan message board known as “/pol/ – Politically Incorrect” with these materials. He was reportedly met with much support (link opens to screenshots from 8chan, posted to Twitter) from other users.
The disturbing manifesto explains that the shooting was inspired by “white genocide.” Make no mistake: The term “white genocide” is popular among white supremacists who want to curb immigration and stomp out minority populations.
The document explicitly targets immigrants and Muslims. It also praises Dylann Roof, the white man who murdered nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. Anders Breivik, who killed literal dozens of people at a summer camp for Norway’s left, also got a grotesque nod of admiration.
It’s “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort” the 8chan poster wrote.
Have you heard of 4chan? Reddit? 8chan, one of the darkest corners of the internet, is comparable to these sites in that it’s an anonymous forum where people from all over the world can log in and talk about, well, close to anything.
These places have obvious opportunity to get unruly (if not outright dangerous), so many have community guidelines, moderators, and rules that block or ban certain content. (Like hate speech, child pornography, threats of violence, and so on.)
8chan opened in October 2013. Since then, there have been more than 80 million posts. The site is reportedly one of the most visited around the world. What’s also important to note about 8chan is that it has a very “troll for lols” approach; many users will post just about anything in order to get a reaction. So which users really believe what? Hard to tell.
8chan has just one rule. “Do not post, request, or link to any content illegal in the United States of America. Do not create boards with the sole purpose of posting or spreading such content.”
Surprising no one, this means that the site quickly became a haven for the alt-right. Remember Gab, the “free speech” site that Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter who murdered 11 worshippers, allegedly posted on before his attack? Yeah. After the massacre, Gab had a hard time staying online.
In 8chan’s case, security provider Cloudfare helps keep the site secure. And easily accessible in the United States.
In an interview with Forbes, Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare’s head of policy, said that if they took away support from 8chan, it wouldn’t do much to actually get it off of the internet. “We're the Fedex of the internet, passing messages on, not looking inside the boxes,” she explained to Forbes.
Oh, and free speech? According to an interview Margaret Gel gave to the Daily Dot, that may not be the grounding basis of 8chan at all.
Gel reached out to the Daily Dot, journalist Ana Valens reports, and alleged that, as a friend of 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, she tested features for 8chan way back in the beginning. Gel reported that his “free speech” rules were basically “just a ploy to get as many users as possible.”
What was the goal behind creating 8chan? According to Gel, Brennan wanted to get enough users to beat out 4chan, and that he “hated most of the people who used his site.”
“He didn’t even like them; they annoyed him, but he saw them as being a means to the end he wanted,” Gel explained to the Daily Dot. Now, 8chan is owned by Jim Watkins.
Do you think sites have a responsibility to police their content? If so, what does that look like on the day to day? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it look like in the face of such enormous violence and tragedy?
