The True Threat

At the outset of an interview held on Christmas Eve of this past year, Fredrick Brennan expresses some relief that our Skype session is audio only: It allows him to relax a bit more.

Throughout this conversation and over two months of further Skype calls and Twitter DMs, the 8chan founder is erudite, outgoing and quick to laugh. This is hard to square with his former reputation as king of the trolls—a free-speech absolutist and overlord of the anonymous and unmoderated chat forum known these days as a global gathering place for white male extremists, an incubator of QAnon and a repository of manifestos written by mass shooters.

Now in his mid-20s and based in the Philippines, Brennan is weary of discussing the many ways his creation slipped out of his control, but he seems to feel duty-bound to do so. He left the site in 2018, having launched it five years earlier, and last year began to speak out on Twitter and in the press. He claims that 8chan, now rebranded as 8kun, is such a danger that it should be permanently deplatformed, an idea repellent both to 8chan devotees and to, well, every other source who went on record for this story, from a developer to a senator to the site’s current owners.

Beyond his obvious intelligence, Brennan has an almost childlike quality that has a lot to do with his newfound enthusiasm for the real world, where events such as his recent marriage have helped draw him from the darkness. He displays little of the awkwardness that often defines your typical tech genius. But he wasn’t always like this.

At the age of 14, already dealing with painful isolation as a result of a congenital condition (he was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, which stunted his growth and keeps him in a wheelchair), Brennan, along with his similarly disabled brother, was placed in New York’s foster care system. The internet became his sanctuary.

“When the internet first came into my house, it was very different to be able to communicate that way, but it also became a replacement for real life,” he says. “And when you’re a kid, you don’t know it’s less than.”

Brennan insists he didn’t intend to create a platform for mass murderers. Just as Facebook began as a site where Harvard students could rate one another’s attractiveness and evolved into a cultural behemoth with the power to affect presidential elections, 8chan grew, albeit on a much smaller scale, into something its creator never imagined.

“Platforms over time develop a personality. 8chan on its first day was never going to get an El Paso shooter posting on it,” he says, referring to the 2019 massacre in a Texas Walmart that left 22 innocent people dead. Adding that incident to the shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Poway, California, 74 people were killed last year by men who’d posted their manifestos on 8chan.

“The platform and the community there developed to allow that kind of behavior,” Brennan says, “and that’s something that takes years to happen.”

His use of the word personality raises questions: What other human traits might 8chan possess? Does its ability to change offer hope that its condition isn’t terminal?

8chan is hardly the first image-and-discussion board of its type: It followed 4chan, which was launched in the mid-2000s by current Google employee Christopher Poole. (The idea for 4chan came, in turn, from Poole’s experience on the Japanese site 2chan.) Poole’s stated ethos for the platform was “a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images.”

The freewheeling camaraderie offered on 4chan and its ilk was welcome in the face of growing internet regulations. 4chan first sprang into the national consciousness when the hacking collective Anonymous began using the board to discuss plans for hacks and pranks. It also bred legendary memes such as Rickrolling, lolcats and Pepe the Frog—the heavy-lidded cartoon amphibian that mutated, without its creator’s consent, into a hard-right mascot. Racists, homophobes, pedophiles and misogynists, drawn by the site’s lax moderation, used their shared beliefs to harass and troll those who opposed them, both online and off.

When the Gamergate controversy—a loose campaign of doxxing and threats leveled at female video game developers and writers—erupted in 2014, Poole banned all discussion of the matter. This prompted outrage among the site’s heaviest users, which in turn prompted a migration to 8chan, at that time a little-known offshoot. Soon the de facto home for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, Brennan’s platform also became such a popular hub for child pornography that the site was briefly delisted from Google Search.

QAnon—a collection of baseless conspiracy theories revolving around Q, a supposed government insider who insists President Trump is fighting a secret battle against a cabal of Democratic elites who run a satanic child-sex ring—exists on the board because the poster’s identity can be confirmed only via their 8chan ID. That is to say, no one knows Q’s real-world identity for certain, but their 8chan handle at least suggests that one person is running the show. At press time there are dozens of Q-related Facebook groups all over the world, with the top few seeing nearly 2,000 posts a day. At least 19 current congressional candidates have voiced support for the conspiracy theory, which has allegedly resulted in several acts of violence and one murder.

Brennan hints at the inner shift that eventually compelled him to leave 8chan: “I was one of these libertarian idiots thinking, Oh, you know, my in-box is just ideologically diverse—even though it was mostly Nazis e-mailing me.”

As the site’s popularity intensified—according to Brennan, it mushroomed from around 100 posts a day to more than 4,000 an hour in 2014—the founder became overwhelmed by the gargantuan task of keeping the board online: Bandwidth and content-flagging issues were constant. Suffering from severe burnout and strapped for funds, he agreed to a partnership with internet entrepreneur Jim Watkins in 2014, on the condition that Brennan would relocate from the U.S. to Watkins’s base in the Philippines and be retained to help run the site.

Watkins, an Army veteran, pig farmer and self-described serial entrepreneur in his mid-50s, accumulated a great deal of his fortune via his first start-up, a porn website designed to circumvent 1990s Japanese censorship laws. The experience not only enriched Watkins (whose ubiquitous uniform of graphic T-shirt and shorts exudes something of a “Roger Stone on vacation” vibe), it instilled in him a disdain for censorship and a reputation for circumventing it.

Brennan sold the site to Jim Watkins in 2015, and Jim’s son Ron emerged as the project’s new champion. It was Ron who first told Jim about Brennan, and it’s Ron who works on 8kun every day.

Initially the move was a blessing. The trio were kindred spirits who forged something of a bond under the site’s motto: Embrace infamy. Brennan, however, began to tire of the daily moral degradation clogging his in-box. By December 2018 he’d had enough.

“The most important change in mind-set was that I came to believe Jim and Ron do not operate 8chan in good faith but rather to twisted ends,” he says. “Their actions continue to betray them—for example, helping QAnon post and making sure QAnon’s identity would remain stable [during the transition from 8chan to 8kun], which they did for no one else.” Ron Watkins, whose father is suing Brennan for libel over remarks he tweeted last year, addressed these claims via Twitter DM: “Fred is currently fighting a criminal libel case, so I can’t recommend him as a good source of information.” Pressed about possible connections to Q, Ron said, “Nobody from our team has had private contact with Q.”

Last March, when a member of 8chan attacked two mosques in New Zealand, killing 51 and injuring 50 more, Brennan’s relief at having left the site began to transmute into anger and shame. God help me if I started this, he thought. He vowed to make ending 8chan his new life aspiration. Little did he know the year’s horrors had just begun.

Ron Watkins is unfailingly polite in all our Twitter DM chats but gets immediately down to business when I raise the subject of censorship. He skates around my questions concerning any guilt he may feel about what happens on the site. What is clear is that he adamantly believes in 8chan’s mission of total autonomy for online speech.

“Corporations are taking control of most online spaces and removing speech while citing their increasingly restrictive terms and conditions of service,” he says. “They frenziedly overreach with such impunity that the government does not even need to participate in censorship anymore.”

Of course not everyone on 8chan/kun is a hateful degenerate, and Ron is quick to point out that those voices would bear the brunt of deplatforming as well. “Our entire platform with thousands of users is being actively silenced because companies that hold too much power over the infrastructure of the internet have decided that certain opinions shouldn’t be allowed to be heard,” he says. “We need to begin discussing an internet bill of rights that addresses content neutrality, data privacy and a host of other issues affecting the daily online lives of all Americans.”

8chan vanished after multiple service providers cut ties in the wake of El Paso. At that time, Alexa’s internet-traffic-ranking service listed 8chan in the top 5,000 sites worldwide—an impressive feat for a site that doesn’t appear in Google searches. The gap between 8chan’s disappearance and 8kun’s birth three months later came at a heavy price for Jim and Ron Watkins: At press time Alexa ranked 8kun 45,094.

When Jim was called before Congress after the El Paso shooting (he wore a QAnon pin affixed to his collar), he made many of these points. Brennan tells me this appearance was a sham. The government, he says, lacks the internet literacy to comprehend what it’s dealing with.

“What Congress gets wrong is they always call in the bad actor, the people who’ve done wrong,” he says. “What they need to do is also bring in 4chan admins and ask, ‘How do you guys do it? How did you clean up the site?’ ”

Judging by the views of a range of techies and legal experts, the site is not the unknown entity here.

The true-threat doctrine, established by the 1969 Supreme Court case Watts v. United States, attempts to lay the groundwork for courts to differentiate between potentially dangerous statements and those made in jest. But in a world where an innocuous cartoon frog and the “OK” hand signal can be appropriated by neofascists, how can one hope to identify and track potentially violent users?

“Defining hate speech is notoriously difficult, and therefore content monitoring at scale is extraordinarily challenging,” says David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, via e-mail. “The range of information, the volume of material and the nuances of context make the task virtually impossible.”

There’s no consensus on when internet speech enters the realm of the harmful and illegal, no line drawn in the sand à la falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. Perhaps no line can be drawn on ground that shifts by the second.

Author, New York Times columnist and former Fusion TV news director Kevin Roose has written extensively about 8chan. “I’m not sure there should be a ‘line’ at all,” he says. “These are private businesses that all have to make, and live with, their own choices about where to draw the line. Some platforms have amplified the voices of reprehensible people and allowed dangerous movements to hijack their services, and their executives will have to live with the repercussions of those choices for the rest of their lives.”

But if the meteoric rise and apparent disregard for social responsibility shown by giants like Facebook have taught us anything, it’s that tech titans can’t be trusted to do what’s right when it harms their bottom line. Longtime Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who introduced the first Senate net-neutrality bill in 2006, tells me the answer may lie in economics.

“There’s no doubt that mainstream platforms like Facebook have failed for far too long to step up and respond to the slime and hate that has no place on a site that also hosts family photo albums and local business pages,” he says. “The largest sites have grown complacent, thanks to their massive size and market dominance, so they have little fear that new competitors with more responsible policies will emerge as true rivals.”

Indeed, essentially every person who uses the internet must adhere to the content-moderation whims of a handful of unelected people whose employers profit directly from online hate and disinformation. Although he opposes government interference that limits online speech—“The last thing I want to do is put Donald Trump and William Barr in charge of a government speech police who decide what people can say online”—Senator Wyden thinks decreasing the power a few people in Silicon Valley wield over billions of others’ online experience could help.

“It’s appropriate for the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission to look at whether the largest tech companies are abusing their market position to prevent real competition, to the detriment of internet users across the country,” Wyden says. “I think real competition would go a long way toward relegating these hateful sentiments to the dark corners of the internet.”

Cole echoes this sentiment: “An antitrust approach may well make sense, to the extent that one of the problems is the control of vast platforms of public debate by a handful of companies.”

But how long would that take, and in the meantime how many sick men will post their manifestos to an unmoderated forum that helps galvanize their poisoned thoughts into action?

Ash Bhat’s RoBhat Labs develops apps—including BotCheck.me, a Google Chrome extension that alerts Twitter users when they encounter fake accounts—to combat a number of online ills. He forcefully opines that the answer lies not in tech nor in government oversight.

“Being able to speak and be heard goes down to our evolution,” he says via e-mail. “We can’t deplatform online communities, especially when we disagree with them. The fact that people are killing people is the problem, not deplatforming. We’ve seen this already! We’ll shut down a site and it’ll inevitably pop right back up. As a society, the shootings are a sign that there’s something incredibly wrong. If anything, we should be listening to these voices. These may be our brothers and sisters—literally.”

Although Bhat and Brennan disagree on deplatforming, both refer to the sites’ users as victims. The men on these sites likely band together because they share feelings of being left behind, of being unloved. Via the sites, they discover human connection, reprehensible though its conduit may be, that their lives previously lacked. Ironically, they can be seen as victims of the same dehumanizing technology through which they’ve found fellowship.

Decentralization, a strategy gaining momentum as the general public reaches a crisis with online-inspired murders, could be another way to break the cycle. Decentralization means users control their own data and resources and disseminate them from their own, much smaller networks. This runs counter to centralized computing, wherein the majority of functions are carried out from remote sources owned and operated by corporations. The allure of such a system is that smaller players could wrest back some of the power currently being hoarded by the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon, YouTube and Twitter. This would make deplatforming nearly impossible, but the hope would be that once big tech’s immense power is diminished, increased competition would force sites to become more beholden to users who don’t want to share online space with neo-Nazis.

The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are unlikely to give up their power without a protracted fight, yet Bhat sees this as a more realistic solution—or at least a breaking point.

“Taking the longer-term lens, the clock is ticking for us to figure this out. The internet seems to be transitioning toward decentralization—even Jack Dorsey and Twitter are taking steps toward this,” Bhat says. “Someday soon we won’t be able to deplat-form these voices. It’s now or then that we start listening to them.”

But this approach cuts both ways: It promises immunity to users, no matter how hateful they may be, while compelling moderators to be smarter about keeping potentially dangerous language off their platforms. It’s impossible to predict which side would win out, or even when this day would come. Perhaps that’s why Brennan is pushing in the other direction.

Ron Watkins likens 8kun’s plight to that of public figures who’ve been felled by cancel culture.

“As we enter the start of a new decade, cancel culture has taken hold, and societal shunning is becoming more and more in vogue, with deplatforming representing the internet’s equivalent,” he says, noting that, thanks to Fredrick Brennan, “8kun weathered many deplatforming attempts even before a single new post was uploaded to the website.”

The amorphous nature of the internet—and the “societal shunning” Watkins observes in the real world—means that confronting online hate speech that begets real-world violence can be accomplished only via a diversity of tactics. Internet literacy for politicians and law enforcement, yes; confronting tech monopolies, yes. But even more so it seems we should reappraise the effects the internet can have on individuals and their perception of the real world.

Consider that for this piece I spoke with sources from all stations of life located all over the globe with an ease unimaginable at the dawn of this century. The fact that I was able to gather these voices without leaving my desk is awe-inspiring, just as it’s an undoubtedly beautiful thing that a lonely boy in a wheelchair can find community and happiness online.

But as this article was coming together, 8kun users were lamenting the arrest of three white supremacists linked to an extremist group that had threatened violence at the Second Amendment gathering in Virginia on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. They saw it as a missed opportunity for carnage and violence.

Fredrick Brennan tells me at one point that part of the problem with the internet is that it has “no tribal elders, no oral history of what it means or what you should do with it or who should be using it.” We are writing that history now. What kind of humanity we imbue this moment with is up to us.