8chan returns as 8kun, claiming that anything considered illegal in the US will be removed; /pol, where mass shooters posted manifestos, is notably absent
and QAnon Is Already Posting Lydia Dishman / Fast Company : From Russia with hate: 8chan is back online Evann Gastaldo / Newser : ‘Cesspool of Hate’ 8chan Is Basically Back Tweets: @nytimes : 8chan, the anonymous message board that has served as a megaphone for violent extremists, is back online. It went dark after companies refused to provide it with critical services following the El Paso shooting, which was announced on the platform. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The relaunch closes the arc that began when the El Paso shooting was announced on 8chan and Cloudflare quit servicing it, leaving the site hopping registrars toward Epik while hobbled by its own vendors. A month earlier, BuzzFeed's coverage had predicted exactly this outcome: that a vanished 8chan would simply reappear as a copycat, as 4chan users once fled to 8chan during Gamergate moderation.
8kun is that copycat, apparently operating from Russia, and it is testing whether a rebrand plus a legality pledge can end the infrastructure blockade. The site's earlier history — a 2015 domain seizure over child-abuse allegations and founder Fredrick Brennan selling the site and disavowing the idea entirely — frames how little continuity the new operators need to inherit the audience.
First-order effects
- QAnon posters are already active on 8kun, meaning the conspiracy movement gains a home before the site's moderation promises are tested.
- Dropping /pol — the board where mass shooters posted manifestos — removes the specific venue tied to the platform's worst incidents, at least nominally.
Second-order effects
- A pledge to remove only content 'illegal in the US' pushes enforcement burden back onto infrastructure providers: any vendor serving 8kun is effectively hosting whatever US law permits, renewing the distribution-layer liability question Cloudflare's exit raised.
- Rival anonymous boards and their hosts face pressure to match or reject the legality-only standard, since 8kun's survival would demonstrate that jurisdiction-shopping defeats service denials.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, deplatforming campaigns produce relocation rather than disappearance: sites move to permissive jurisdictions, rebrand, and adopt minimal legal-compliance moderation, shifting the fight from hosting decisions to regulation and payment/legal chokepoints.
- Anonymous imageboards' repeated collapses and resurrections — 4chan's own hack-driven outage and return among them — suggest the durable structure is a diaspora: communities that persist across domains regardless of which single site is up.
The trend: Extremist-tolerant platforms are surviving infrastructure denial by changing names and jurisdictions while retreating to bare US-legality moderation.