8chan

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8chan (or infinitechan) is an imageboard holding to extremely strong principles of free speech. It started in 2013, and came to popularity during Gamergate from August 2014 on after Gamergate's fondness for doxing people got too much even for 4chan to put up with.

8chan was founded by Fredrick Brennan, nicknamed "Hotwheels" because he is a wheelchair user, due to severely disabling osteogenesis imperfecta[wp] (brittle bone disease).

It trades on a reputation of allowing even freer speech than 4chan, which disallows doxing and comes down hard on child porn. 8chan allows content such as borderline child porn (lolicon,[nb 1] clothed children in sexual poses) that its proprietor claims is technically not illegal in the US — though mostly it survives because the feds concentrate their limited resources on the producers of child porn, and not so much on those copying it — even almost certainly illegal material.[1]

8chan has suggested changing hosting to PRQ.se,[2] a hosting service whose customers have included The Pirate Bay, WikiLeaks, and NAMBLA of all people.[3]

Brennan has also written for Daily Stormer, the news site of Stormfront, in favour of eugenics, blaming the lack of a eugenics program in the US for his disability.[4] He says that when he contacted the Daily Stormer asking for an interview, they suggested he just write an article for them.[5] Defending his contribution on Reddit, Brennan insisted that he is not a neo-Nazi or white nationalist — he merely considers the Stormer the right-wing equivalent of such "far-left" publications as The Huffington Post or The Daily Dot — although he does indeed support eugenics. He also stated that "building hype around my business is my job, especially when we are strapped for cash and can't advertise directly".[6] It is possible he does not realize that these are not the sort of Nazis that have boxes and boxes of gold.

The latest board to be front-paged is /baphomet/ (named for the demon Baphomet, of course), which streamlines the most extreme and disturbing forms of harassment for which 8chan is notorious, gathering personal information of the site's targets and coordinating swatting efforts.[7] The board is also replete with grotesque images of abuse of humans and animals, the sole purpose of which is to disgust outsiders and thus deter spying on the board's operations. Initial targets were those who worked to report the child porn on 8chan to the authorities, though many of the current targets are the same people Gamergate has been targeting for months. Gamergaters off the board will deny that it's part of their movement, while simultaneously cautioning against provoking /baphomet/ in a way that totally isn't a threat.

On February 9, 2015, /baphomet/ underwent a total history wipe after it was revealed that the board's moderator Benjamin Biddix had posted the mailing address, phone number, and Social Security number for Judge Katherine Forrest, the federal judge who presided over the the Silk Road black market case. Biddix had allegedly been selling dox to fund his attempt to leave the United States for Shanghai.[8] His TOR site was then seized by multiple national and international law enforcement agencies.[9]

Notes

  1. The term lolicon refers to anime/cartoon media featuring sexualized or sexually-explicit depictions of young girls. It derives from a Japanese portmanteau of the phrase "Lolita complex."

Footnotes

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