- After the horrific shooting in El Paso,
a small barely moderated forum
became the center of attention.
- 8chan.
- After 8chan.
- I mean it was on 8chan.
- A site 8chan.
- The killer posted a rambling essay on 8chan,
laying out his hate fueled motives.
And it wasn't the first time this had happened either.
Since it's launch in 2013, 8chan has become known
as a place where hate can thrive.
Even it's founder has said we'd be better off
if the site just disappeared.
And any company that works with 8chan
is under pressure to kick it offline.
But how do you take a site off the internet?
Running a website requires a whole stack of services.
And if it gets blocked, or deplatformed at any level
it can become either hard to use
or completely inaccessible.
At the bottom of the stack you've got the host.
The server that actually holds information for the site.
If you wanna reach that host by typing a link
you need a registered domain
which is handled by an organization called ICANN
and a series of companies called registrars.
In the middle, you've got other services
that serve more specialized roles.
If a site wants to collect money with credit cards
for example it needs a payment processor,
like Stripe or PayPal.
If it wants to protect itself from denial-of-service
or DDoS attacks, it needs a mitigation service
from a company like Cloudflare.
And on top on all that, there are big social networks,
mobile app stores and search engines
that can boost the sites reach.
Opponents of sites like 8chan have targeted every level
of that stack and they've seen some success.
Cloudflare cut off 8chan's DDoS protection shortly
after the shooting, leaving it open to attack.
8chan moved to a competing provider called Epik
but that provider was leasing hardware from
a different company called Voxility,
which banned Epik as soon as it heard about 8chan.
After that, 8chan just dropped off the internet.
Is it going to stay offline though?
Probably not.
There are all kinds of internet infrastructure companies
that specialize in keeping offensive
or even illegal sites online.
Sometimes just outside the reach of law enforcement.
Anonymity networks like Tor can disguise
where content is hosted or let sites bypass
the traditional domain name system.
There's usually no way to ban a site
from the internet forever.
One of the clearest examples of this happened in 2017.
When the neo-Nazi blog, Daily Stormer
was widely condemned for mocking the death
of anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer.
GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Google and others,
all stopped working with the site.
And for a while it couldn't find anywhere to register
a domain name, which made it very hard to find.
But once the controversy died down
it found a new registrar and resumed operating.
Members of a site can also just go form a new community.
A lot of 8chan's members came from another message board
called 4chan, which had tried to moderate some
of its most toxic elements and ended up
just sending them somewhere worse.
If 8chan gets shut down, users can move on to other forums
or launch private chat rooms.
So, what's the point then?
Well, there are a few major arguments
for pressuring companies to deplatform hate sites.
It makes it a lot harder for sites to collect money
or run ads, even if they get traffic.
It can also make it harder for people to encounter
these dark corners of the internet in the first place.
These aren't huge platforms like Reddit or Twitter.
At the end of the day, 8chan is a pretty small place.
And as we saw earlier this week,
revoking things like DDoS protection
can knock a site offline while it's experiencing
a burst of publicity.
Just because you can't keep something off
the internet forever,
doesn't mean you can't reduce its power.
But there's also a dark side to deplatforming
because it basically involves asking a handful
of private companies or CEOs
to act like internet gatekeepers.
Cloudflare is incredibly powerful.
Almost 20% of the top 10 000
internet properties use it right now.
And it has no real system of accountability or transparency.
When Cloudflare kicked off the Daily Stormer in 2017,
Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince essentially got mad,
pushed a button and dropped the site.
- I woke up one morning and got sick
of these jerks using our platform and I flipped a switch
and they were no longer on the internet.
And I'm not sure that that's a power
that any individual, especially any individual
that isn't politically sort of,
has a political legitimacy to them
that any individual should be making.
- Cloudflare is a private company,
and it has every right to ban a customer.
But Prince said that he wasn't comfortable
making arbitrary decisions
about which sites can stay online.
These lower level infrastructure businesses
have traditionally tried to stay out of content moderation.
Because any decisions they make will have huge ramifications
for freedom of speech on the internet.
And while banning some ugly sites
might seem like an easy call,
these companies also face pressure
to ban political dissidents across the world.
And repressive governments use
a lot of the same arguments to paint
those groups as hateful and dangerous.
It's certainly not ideal to have a few CEOs
making huge decisions with no oversight or appeals process.
Cloudflare certainly thinks so.
When it kicked out 8chan it asked governments
to establish better guidelines
for when to pull a site offline.
Lots of countries can access 8chan
and if it weren't so easy to carry out mass shootings
in America, online hate might not spill
into deadly violence so often.
But at least in the US, where Cloudflare operates,
institutions don't seem sure how
to deal with white nationalist terrorism.
And when Congress has amended the law
to keep bad content offline, it's often turned out badly.
Like the FOSTA SESTA bill,
which is meant to stop online trafficking.
But has ended up making web companies marginalize
sex workers or purge adult content in general.
Crafting policies to address hate online
and setting up systems to enforce them
could take a long time if it happens at all.
So if people wanna keep these sites off the internet
they basically have to pressure companies like Cloudflare.
Even if the companies don't want to be making those calls.
Thank you for watching this is a very serious topic
that goes far beyond just the internet.
If you wanna help out some of the communities affected
or fight hate groups please just check out
the links in the description of this video.