SAN FRANCISCO — 8chan is back.
The anonymous message board began flickering back online Saturday and was fully visible and available Monday, 3 months after it had gone dark.
The site, which has served as a megaphone for violent extremists, was knocked offline in August after several tech companies refused to provide it with critical services such as a functioning web address. At the time, the tech companies said they would not work with 8chan because it provided mass killers with a place to air and spread their violent and often racist messages.
The shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in early August, along with attacks at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and at a synagogue in Poway, California, this year were all announced on 8chan before they began. The attackers posted screeds to a section of 8chan that was ostensibly dedicated to politics, and does not appear on the new site.
After the El Paso shooting, one of the 8chan founders, Fredrick Brennan, said, “Shut the site down.” In September, the site’s owner, Jim Watkins, testified before Congress about 8chan’s operation and policies. The site had been operating out of the Philippines.
Over the weekend, 8chan reemerged under a new name, 8kun. Ron Watkins, an administrator for the site and the son of Jim Watkins, said that it was somewhat inaccessible because it was being hit with overwhelming traffic.
Ron Watkins did not respond to a request for comment.
The message board went offline in August after Cloudflare, a company that protects websites from cyberattacks, said it would no longer provide its services to 8chan because of the site’s willingness to incite violence. Tucows, which helps companies register their website addresses, also booted 8chan from its platform.
Administrators of 8chan scrambled to find alternatives, but were unsuccessful for weeks. Now Tucows appears to be working with the message board again. 8chan’s new web address, 8kun, is registered with Tucows.
Tucows and its chief executive, Elliot Noss, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It was only a matter of time before 8chan found a new home online, internet experts said.
Like spammers, malware sellers and hackers who swap stolen personal data online, 8chan was expected to seek out web hosting from overseas providers or on the dark web. Other fringe sites, such as the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, have also pieced together internet presences after mainstream providers terminated their services.
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WASHINGTON - 8chan, the online message board linked to several recent mass shootings, plans to restrict parts of the website during a "state of emergency," the site's owner Jim Watkins told a US House panel in a written statement.
Watkins completed his closed-door deposition on Thursday, said Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and Ranking Republican Mike Rogers. The panel last month subpoenaed the American living in the Philippines to answer its questions about whether the website "amplifies extremist views, leading to the radicalization of its users."
Watkins "provided vast and helpful information to the Committee about the structure, operation, and policies of 8Chan and his other companies. We look forward to his continued cooperation with the Committee as he indicated his desire to do so during today’s deposition," they said in a joint statement.
"If 8chan comes back online, it will be done when 8chan develops additional tools to counter illegal content under United States law," Watkins said in the statement released by his lawyer.
"If 8chan returns, staff would implement a way to restrict certain parts of the website during a state of emergency, in which case any board in question would be put in a read-only mode until it would be deemed safe enough to enable posting again," it said.
Critics last month pressed tech companies to shun 8chan, which in its Twitter profile describes its location as “The Darkest Reaches of the Internet" and has become a hotbed for white extremist content.
Thompson and Rogers said last month the shooting deaths of 22 people at an El Paso Walmart store was "at least the third act of supremacist violence linked to your website this year."
The El Paso gunman allegedly posted a 4-page statement on 8chan before his attack, while the site was also apparently used this year by the shooters who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and a synagogue in Poway, California, lawmakers told Watkins in a letter last month.
Benjamin Barr, a lawyer for Watkins, said in a statement to the committee, that "8chan has never tolerated illegal speech and has a consistent track record of working with law enforcement agencies when appropriate."
Watkins said 8chan "has worked responsibly with law enforcement agencies when unprotected speech is discovered on its platform. No single platform can sensibly prevent all hateful, illegal, or threatening speech - it can only act in due time to remove it."
The company did remove some posts soon after mass shootings in Texas, California and New Zealand, he said.
But Watkins added, "my company has no intention of deleting constitutionally protected hate speech. I feel the remedy for this type of speech is counter speech, and I'm certain that this is the view of the American justice system."
The message board has been voluntarily down since late August.
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EL PASO, Texas - The community of this border city continues to mourn for the lives of 22 people killed in the Aug. 3 shooting at the Walmart store. They are also trying to make sense of why a 21-year-old man from a Dallas suburb would go on a shooting spree.
But one thing certain for now is that the gunman used the internet messaging forum 8chan prior to his crime where he expressed hatred for Hispanic people and laid out a plan for a deadly attack on the Hispanic community.
The site's creator Fredrick Brennan, who migrated to the Philippines in 2014, admitted that he created a "Frankenstein monster" after realizing that the online forum has led to massacres in the US.
Brennan started 8chan in 2013 as a means of free speech. He handed over management to a man named Jim Watkins in 2016.
Brennan said it's been challenging to moderate postings on the forum. He's been calling for the site to be shut down. It's now inaccessible.
“I never really imagined that this would happen -- that shooters would post their manifestos on 8chan. And I put some of the blame on the way they're administering it. They have this saying that was on 8chan before it was closed, you know, 'embrace infamy,' and they had that right on the homepage of 8chan," Brennan said.
Brennan said one of the reasons he resigned was because of the difficulty in moderating the site.
"It's like letting the mental patients run the asylum," he said.
US lawmakers have asked that the current owner of 8chan, Watkins, testify before the House Homeland Security Committee.
According to authorities, Watkins is not located in the Philippines but he posted a message on 8chan's Twitter account claiming to be on his way to America to accept the lawmakers' invitation.
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One was fueled by racist hatred of immigrants and warned of a "Hispanic invasion." The other's motives are less clear but he apparently resented women and compiled a "hit list" of girls in high school.
Police and the FBI were trying to piece together on Tuesday what drove two young American men to commit unspeakable acts of carnage over the weekend.
Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old unemployed white man from the Dallas suburb of Allen, opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon at a Walmart on Saturday in El Paso, Texas.
About 20 minutes before the rampage, which left 22 people dead, he posted a four-page white supremacist "manifesto" on the online forum 8chan that railed against Hispanics.
In the document titled "The Inconvenient Truth," Crusius wrote that the attack "is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."
Crusius claimed he was "defending" the US "from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion" and made references to the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand, where a white gunman killed 51 worshippers at two mosques in March.
El Paso police chief Greg Allen said Crusius has not shown any remorse since his arrest and "appears to be in a state of shock and confusion."
According to court documents, Crusius has been unemployed for the past five months and living with his grandparents.
In a statement, his grandparents said he had lived with them while attending classes at Collin County College but moved out of their home about six weeks ago.
According to CNN, a Twitter account linked to Crusius frequently shared tweets by President Donald Trump including one with Trump's name spelled out with guns.
In a LinkedIn profile, Crusius wrote, "I'm not really motivated to do anything more than what's necessary to get by.
"Working in general sucks, but i guess a career in Software Development suits me well. I spend about 8 hours every day on the computer so that counts towards technology experience I guess."
El Paso is about a nine-hour drive from the Dallas area and Crusius appears to have deliberately selected the city because of its heavily Hispanic population.
El Paso lies on the Rio Grande River which marks the US border with Mexico, and has a population of 680,000, of which 83 percent are of Hispanic descent.
- 'An oddball' -
The motivations of the other gunman, Connor Betts, 24, are less clear but several former friends told US media that he had a history of disturbing behavior, particularly towards women.
Also armed with a semi-automatic weapon, Betts killed nine people including his sister, 22-year-old Megan Betts, in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning. He was shot dead by police within a minute.
Investigators have found no evidence so far to indicate that the shooting was motivated by racial hatred.
"Just based on where we're at now we are not seeing any indication of race being a motive," Dayton police chief Richard Biehl said.
Betts was white and six of his nine victims were black.
Mika Carpenter, 24, who has known Betts since she was 13 years old, told The New York Times "he was kind of hateful to women because they didn't want to date him."
The Dayton Daily News reported that Betts had been suspended from Bellbrook High School for drawing up a "hit list" of girls.
According to Buzzfeed News, Betts was a member of a "pornogrind" heavy metal band called Menstrual Munchies which performed songs with themes of sexual violence.
Demoy Howell, a friend of Betts, told the Dayton Daily News that Betts was "always a bit of an oddball."
"He had a dark sense of humor -- jokes about people dying," Howell told the newspaper. "He would wear all black. I remember sensing a dark energy around him.
"I think this is less of a hate crime and more of an 'I hate everybody' crime," Howell said.
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U.S. cyber security firm Cloudflare on Monday said the company will terminate online message board 8chan as its customer after a shooter used the messaging forum just before killing 20 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas on Saturday.
The shooter is believed to have posted a four-page statement on 8chan, and called the Walmart attack "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas".
The suspect was officially identified as a 21-year-old white male from Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb some 650 miles (1,046 km) east of El Paso, which lies along the Rio Grande, across the U.S.-Mexico border from Ciudad Juarez. Citing law enforcement officials, multiple news media reports named the suspect as Patrick Crusius.
The suspect's post on 8chan expressed support for the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.
"We just sent a notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time," Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince said in a blog post.
"Based on evidence we've seen, it appears that he (gunman)posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people," Prince said.
The CEO's blog added that while 8chan did not violate law by not moderating the "hate-filled" content posted by its users, it has "created an environment that revels in violating its spirit".
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