Cloudflare terminates service to 8chan after recent US shootings

[steven36]

8chan has harbored a community of hate and three mass-shooters have now hosted manifestos on the platform.

 

 

Cloudflare, a company that provides website security and internet infrastructure services, announced on Sunday that it would drop 8chan as a customer.

 

"8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate," said Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO, in a statement published on late Sunday night.

8chan failed to moderate its content

Prince said the site has failed to moderate its "hate-filled community."

 

Because of this, 8chan, a forum and bulletin board, has now been the host of a third mass-shooter manifesto.

 

Mass-shooters have uploaded manifestos explaining their actions on 8chan on three occasions before going out and committing terror attacks.

1. The terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019.
2. Terror attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, on April 27, 2019.
3. Attack at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019.

 

The last shooting took place over the weekend, when a second mass-shooting also took place in the US, in Dayton, Ohio, although this has not been linked to 8chan.

 

Nonetheless, both shootings have contributed to a growing voice of the US public against online communities and groups that keep harboring and radicalizing mass shooters.

 

 

"The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths," Prince said.

"Cloudflare is not a government"

However, the Cloudflare CEO said the company struggled with the decision, as they felt they shouldn't be made to take decisions on what is good and bad on the internet.

 

"Cloudflare is not a government," Prince said before arguing that law enforcement agencies should be the ones deciding when to ban this kind of sites from the internet, and not leave it to private companies to take these decisions.

 

Cloudflare kicking 8chan off its infrastructure means the site is now open to DDoS attacks, among other things. Multiple hacktivists have announced online plans to attack the site after 12:00am PT on Sunday, when Cloudflare said it would drop the site from its servers.

 

8chan is still online, at the time of writing. The site's domain registrar has not announced a similar ban, meaning users will still be able to access the site, as the domain will still work.

Second site kicked off Cloudflare after someone's death

8chan is the second controversial site that Cloudflare kicks off its infrastructure. In 2017, Cloudflare terminated The Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi news and propaganda site, after the website posted an article mocking a woman killed during white supremacy protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

Following Cloudflare's ban, the site was subsequentially banned and kicked off other platforms as well, but it has not gone down for good, continuing to operate to this day, albeit with some inconveniences and downtimes as it constantly switched web hosting providers and domain name registrars.

 

Something similar is now expected to happen to 8chan, a website that users created from the old 4chan community and has a controversial history of its own.

 

8chan came to be after 4chan moderators started cracking down on violent content posted on their platform after the Gamergate sexism and harassment campaign -- with some harrassment against female gamers and journalists being called on and coordinated from the site's image boards. As a result, most of 4chan's most aggressive and extremist userbase found a new home on 8chan.

 

"Unfortunately the action we take today won't fix hate online," the Cloudflare CEO said. "It will almost certainly not even remove 8chan from the Internet. But it is the right thing to do. Hate online is a real issue."

 

Source

[steven36]

Update: 8chan far-right forum offline as Cloudflare cuts support

 

 

The far-right web forum 8chan, used to celebrate mass shootings and spread suspects' so-called “manifestos”, has been forced offline after losing its cyber-security protection.

 

Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based firm that provides added security for websites to prevent cyber-attacks, said it would stop protecting 8chan at midnight Pacific Time (08:00 BST) on Monday.

The 21-year-old suspect in this weekend’s shooting in El Paso, Texas, is understood to have used 8chan to spread his manifesto.

 

Previously, the site was also used by the suspect in March’s shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, as well as the suspect in April's synagogue shooting in Poway, California.

 

Losing Cloudflare’s protection has made 8chan vulnerable to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, whereby a website is bombarded with traffic that overwhelms its servers, rendering it inaccessible.

 

A few minutes after the Cloudflare service was withdrawn, 8chan did indeed become unavailable.

 

However, 8chan's site administrator says it was movingto another security firm, BitMitigate, based in the US state of Washington. BitMitigate's website says it has "a proven commitment to liberty".

 

BitMitigate stepped in to help net-Nazi site the Daily Stormer when it lost Cloudflare protection in 2017.

 

The BBC has approached BitMitigate for comment. But at this time 8Chan remains offline.

 

Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince had said, in the wake of Saturday’s shootings, that his firm would continue to support 8chan as its policy was to remain neutral over the type of content the service protected.

 

However, on Sunday evening Mr Prince wrote in a blog post that "8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate”.

 

“They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” Mr Prince wrote.

 

"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.”

 

Mr Prince warned that while 8chan would be disrupted by Cloudflare’s decision, it would likely be able to rebuild itself - as was the case when Cloudflare stopped providing protection for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site, in 2017.

 

“They quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor,” Mr Prince wrote.

 

"That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn't respond to legal process.

 

He added: "I have little doubt we'll see the same happen with 8chan. While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online. It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate.

 

"In taking this action we've solved our own problem, but we haven't solved the Internet’s.”

 

8chan is a forum created in 2013 by Fredrick Brennan as an alternative to 4chan, a message board popular with gamers. 8chan promised less moderation of controversial topics and images that were being removed from 4chan. As such, 8chan has hosted far-right extremist views and imagery.

 

Mr Brennan gave up ownership of 8chan in 2015 and has since called for it to be shut down. Following Cloudflare’s announcement, he wrote on Twitter: "Thank you so much @CloudFlare Finally this nightmare might have an end.”

 

8chan is now owned and run by Jim Watkins, a former US army veteran, believed to be living in the Philippines.

What is Cloudflare?

The San Francisco-based company protects websites from attacks, as well as making websites load more quickly for legitimate users.

 

It can be thought of as a kind of bouncer or security guard for websites that get a large amount of traffic, or may be a likely target of cyber-attacks.

 

Cloudflare's technology is able to verify where internet traffic is coming from, i.e. distinguishing whether the visitor is a genuine person, or a network of automated bots that is being used to flood a website. It is meant to block any attempts from "bad" traffic getting through.

 

Cloudflare provides protection for more than 12 million websites, and is expected to float on the stock market later this year.

 

Chief executive Matthew Prince has expressed concern at the power his company has to decide whether or not a website is able to exist on the open internet.

 

 

  Source

 

[steven36]

8chan

 

Some of you might’ve read the@Cloudflare news already. They're dropping 8chan. (link: https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/) blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-se… There might be some downtime in the next 24-48 hours while we find a solution (that includes our email so timely compliance with law enforcement requests may be affected).

 

Source: Twitter