The aftermath of last weekend’s deadly El Paso mass shooting sparked a battle by tech platforms to drop 8chan, as the Washington Post initially reported. On Tuesday, the situation grew even more dire for 8chan after owner Jim Watkins was called to testify to Congress, Reuters reports.
After the extremist message board was dropped by internet service provider Cloudflare, 8chan reappeared briefly, bolstered by BitMitigate — until BitMitigate, 8chan and neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer all went dark. Voxility, another tech firm that leased servers to BitMitigate, had announced it was dropping all server support to BitMitigate, which previously supported the Daily Stormer after that site was dropped by Cloudflare in 2017.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince briefly alluded to the company’s previous high-visibility drop of services to the Daily Stormer during his Des Moines appearance at the Monetery Tech Summit in May.
“Today, Cloudflare runs a whole bunch of the internet, and we can, at some level, pick and choose what is and is not online. But I don’t think that I have, personally, any political legitimacy to be the arbiter of what is and is not online,” Prince told Dwolla CEO Ben Milne at the time.
In a blog post on Monday, Prince announced the immediate end of Cloudflare services for 8chan.
“Many of our customers run platforms of their own on top of our network. If our policies are more conservative than theirs, it effectively undercuts their ability to run their services and set their own policies. We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design,” Prince wrote. “8chan has crossed that line.”