If 8chan vanished, its users would likely just flock to a new copycat site, like how 4chan users switched to 8chan amid increased moderation during Gamergate
Less than an hour before killing at least 20 people and injuring some 26 more in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, the suspected shooter …
BuzzFeed NewsRyan Broderick
Context & Ripple Effects
El Paso was the third mass shooting announced on 8chan, and bellingcat's reporting traced how its /pol/ board deliberately radicalizes users and gamifies massacres — following [[a:939582|Christchurch, which established the pattern of a shooting announced on 8chan and amplified across mainstream platforms]]. The immediate response came from infrastructure, not law: Cloudflare terminated service and 8chan scrambled to a new registrar, Epik.
BuzzFeed's argument is that this infrastructure squeeze misses the point: the site's user base predates 8chan itself, having migrated there from 4chan when Gamergate-era moderation tightened. The prediction was quickly borne out — by November the community had reconstituted itself as 8kun, minus /pol/ but with promises to remove anything illegal in the US.
First-order effects
Cloudflare's exit and the registrar switch leave 8chan's operators dependent on vendors willing to host them, with uptime — not audience — as their binding constraint.
Users who posted manifestos on /pol/ lose their announcement channel of choice, but the community's own history shows it treats platform loss as a relocation event, not an endpoint.
Second-order effects
Infrastructure providers — CDNs, registrars, hosts — are forced into case-by-case moderation decisions they never designed for, with each refusal pushing traffic toward fringe vendors like Epik.
Copycat sites inherit the audience while shedding the brand liability, so pressure on any one domain mostly determines where the next massacre announcement appears rather than whether one does.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, content governance migrates upstream to a handful of infrastructure chokepoints whose ad hoc takedowns displace communities instead of dissolving them — a whack-a-mole dynamic regulators have yet to address.
Rebranded successors like 8kun adopt legality-based rulesets to survive vendor scrutiny, suggesting extremist platforms will converge on nominal compliance while the radicalization function relocates.
The trend: Content moderation is moving upstream to infrastructure providers like Cloudflare and registrars, which can knock sites offline but so far only displace their communities to copycat successors.
Mmmmmaybe, don't think this piece acknowledges the weird specificities of each messageboard culture. I don't think these can be easily copied and pasted to new places. https://twitter.com/...
This is the equivalent of GOP politicians throwing their hands up and saying, “What can you do?” Obviously there's not one solution to the problem of white nationalist gun violence, but the idea we shouldn't do the obvious/easy stuff first is absurd. https://twitter.com/...
yeah we know the problem isn't 8chan but, much like not impeaching the president, not shutting down places that enable and allow this kind of behavior is why we're here in the first place and why Americans are like this https://twitter.com/...
Think smart, make them switch to 16chan, then 32chan, they think it's fine but just seven days later their URL is bigger than the known universe https://twitter.com/...
Saying “if 8chan is banned, they will go somewhere else” is the equivalent of saying “if guns are banned, they'll still be used.” it's about making it harder for scum to do scummy things. How is this so hard to grasp https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
I think the harder we make it to operate the better. I think that to do otherwise is to imply a sort of approval, especially to that type of user, it allows them to spin conspiracy theories ‘well, if they disapprove, why are we still here’ https://twitter.com/...
Too simple. There is value in fracturing a terrorist movement even if it's temporary. And there is value in issuing a warning to the next chan developers that shame and trouble will follow. https://twitter.com/...
Cloudflare's lawyer, pointing to when the company stopped services for Daily Stormer, says Cloudflare's impact was small because Daily Stormer still online. But it would an exceptionally bumpy ride for the site https://www.vice.com/... pic.twitter.com/SYntLpeuxV
This is the standard anti-regulation argument, and it's false. The culture of a platform is driven by its architecture and administration. When a bad site is shut down, its culture doesn't magically “migrate” elsewhere, particularly if the alternative sites are harder to access. …
@Techmeme @broderick Not everyone migrated from 4chan, and not not everyone migrated to Voat when Reddit started cracking down on hate subs. Cracking down does help minimize harm, especially if they keep losing hosting providers.
@Techmeme @broderick Fine, whatever, at least then you disintegrate the network, demean their spirits and deplete their resources. Rinse, repeat, but that is what it takes. Let these hatemongers scream into the wind over and over and over again until they are too exhausted to con…
Ryan captures the futility of shutting down 8chan. I think we should make things miserable and difficult as possible for white nationalists terrorits online. But the solution will have to be so much bigger than just relying on web hosters to stamp it out https://www.buzzfeednews.…
@Techmeme @broderick If that was the case Loomer, Milo, etc. wouldn't be whining about getting booted off of twitter and other mainstream social media platforms. There is a penalty to being deplatformed.
Sure. The difference is we're not trying to blow such radicals off the planet. But deter their ability to organize, terrorize, recruit. There may not be a “done.” Fine. But we need not make it so damn easy, seamless. Permissible, with a free stage. https://twitter.com/...
When the O&A Reddit was shut down a few months back, the hateful users from there briefly tried one more sub, but after that sub's banning they've pretty much scattered. It's about making it harder to access, especially for potential recruits. That's why we deplatform. https://tw…