The founder of the site 8chan, where a shooter may have posted a racist, anti-immigrant screed before killing 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, called for the messaging board to be shut down on Sunday.
Fredrick Brennan, who created the site in 2013, told the New York Times that the current owner of the unmoderated, often hate-filled chat site needs to shutter it.
“Shut the site down,” Brennan said. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there.”
“And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too,” he added. “They just don’t realize it.”
Investigators believe that Patrick Crusius, the suspected gunman, may be behind a hate-filled manifesto that was posted on 8chan shortly before he allegedly began shooting up the Walmart.
8chan was also where the New Zealand mosque shooter and the San Diego synagogue shooter posted their plans for violence earlier this year.
The site is now run by Jim Watkins, an army veteran, who’s insisted that he’s “obviously not a white supremacist” while shrugging off the white nationalists who use his platform.
“I don’t have a problem with white supremacists talking on 8chan,” Watkins told Splinter in April. “They have reasons for their beliefs. I don’t need to justify their reasons.”
“They have reasons for their beliefs.” Yeah…like they are hate-filled, small-minded, ignorant, insecure bigots who can’t admit to their own short comings.
Unbelievable. What a vile person.
There is literally open dialogue praising mass shootings and mass shooters on the site, discussing best approaches and gear for mass shootings, discussing shooters “high scores” (casualty counts), etc. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto is essentially a summarization of discussion found on that site. It is a place where young men become radicalized in a way that is no different (other than supporting ideology) than suicide bombers in middle eastern countries. It must test the bounds of what this country can find acceptable, even under the First Amendment.
Maybe discobot should visit 8chan for a while and take a break from signing me out here randomly every 10 minutes or so.
I like that idea. Discobot was hassling me earlier today when I was trying to post and kept telling what I was trying to post was an incomplete sentence. Ummmm, I passed fourth grade – I know what complete and incomplete sentences are and was deliberately posting what I was posting.