8chan owner Jim Watkins defends speech forum in wake of El Paso shooting

The owner of the forum points to Facebook after his company was linked to mass shootings.

8Chan owner Jim Watkins has defended his company via a YouTube video. Picture: YouTube

The owner of online forum 8chan defended his company in a YouTube video against the internet-services provider that effectively took it offline and against attempts to silence platforms of speech.

Jim Watkins, an internet entrepreneur who took control of 8chan in 2015, said the forum has been helping law enforcement with its investigation into a Saturday mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart store that left 22 people dead and more than 20 injured.

The House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday wrote Mr Watkins asking him to testify about the events and 8chan’s posting of content linked to three mass shootings: “Americans deserve to know what, if anything, you, as the owner and operators, are doing to address the proliferation of extremist content on 8chan.” Mr Watkins said he believed a manifesto allegedly written by the suspected shooter was first posted to Facebook’s Instagram and then uploaded to 8chan by another user — not the suspect himself. “I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but it wasn’t uploaded by the murderer. That is clear,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said that the company has “found nothing that supports this theory” that the manifesto first appeared on its platform. Facebook disabled an Instagram account associated with the suspect on Saturday, an account that hadn’t been active in more than a year, and has been working with law enforcement on investigating the matter since then.

Attempts to reach Mr Watkins for additional comment weren’t successful. 8chan is an online message board in which users can anonymously post text, though discussions tend to be driven by images. It is moderated by employees, who are believed to play a limited role since 8chan has described itself as a bastion of unconstrained free speech.

The forum has been linked to accused shooters of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque massacre in March and April’s synagogue shooting in Poway, California. The man accused of the October shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead allegedly used another fringe online forum, called Gab.com, to broadcast his intentions. Gab.com later said it had suspended the account.

Mr Watkins said Cloudflare’s move to end support for 8chan on Sunday was politically motivated and left the forum’s one million users without a home to freely express opinions. He alleged that Cloudflare did so because he believes it is pursuing an initial public offering.

“It is disturbing to me that it could be so easily shut down,” said Mr Watkins about 8chan in the roughly seven-and-a-half-minute video in which he speaks into a camera with “Taps” playing in the background. Cloudflare “has dispersed a peacefully assembled group of people talking, ” he said.

Multiple times in the video, Mr Watkins offered condolences to the victims of the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and said “thoughts and prayers are for the victims of the violence everywhere.” He also said he hoped 8chan service will be restored shortly.

A representative for Cloudflare said the company doesn’t comment on rumour or speculation in regard to the IPO allegations and referred to Chief Executive Matthew Prince’s blog post Sunday on the reason the company parted ways with 8chan.

“The rationale is simple,” said Mr Prince in the blog post. “They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.” On Monday, Cloudflare general counsel Doug Kramer added that the company’s decision to cease business with 8chan was prompted by media reports connecting the online forum to several deadly shootings, not just the one that took place Saturday in El Paso. He declined to comment on whether Cloudflare is pursuing an IPO or not.

While Cloudflare has previously said its duty isn’t to police content, in 2017 it ceased service to the Daily Stormer, a bulletin board for self-proclaimed white supremacists, after Daily Stormer began claiming that Cloudflare secretly supported its ideology.

After Cloudflare cut ties with 8chan, the forum said Monday it was working with another internet-services provider, Epik’s BitMitigate, to restore the website. But later in the day, a cloud-services company that Epik worked with dropped it as a customer, leaving 8chan offline.

Epik Chief Executive Rob Monster has previously described removing sites from platforms as digital censorship. He didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

8chan founder Frederick Brennan, who ceded control of the forum in 2015, praised Cloudflare on Twitter and criticised Mr Watkins, urging him to shutter 8chan. “The only ones who will suffer from 8chan going down are mass shooters who planned to use it as a platform and Jim Watkins,” Mr Brennan tweeted Monday night.

In his YouTube video Tuesday, Mr Watkins also accused the country’s largest tech companies of unfairly blaming 8chan for the rampage in El Paso, though he didn’t call out any by name. “The spirit of what the president of the United States asked tech companies to do has been violated,” he said. “Let’s look at the deflection that took place here: publicly companies casting blame for murder on small, private, law-abiding companies.”

The Wall Street Journal