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After more racist shootings, take one guess which registrar 8chan just switched to

Kevin Murphy, August 5, 2019, 06:43:59 (UTC), Domain Registrars

Controversial web forum 8chan has moved its domain name to a new registrar after it was linked to at least one of the two mass shootings that occurred in the US over the weekend.
According to Whois records, it’s just jumped to racist-friendly Epik, having been registered at Tucows since 2003.
The switch appears to have happened in the last few hours. At time of writing, you’re going to get different results depending which Whois server you ping.
Some servers continue to report Tucows as the registrar of record, perhaps using cached data, but Epik’s result looks like this:
Whois output
8chan is an image/discussion board that describes itself as “the Darkest Reaches of the Internet”. It’s reportedly heavily used by racists, extremists and those with an interest in child pornography.
It was widely linked by the media to the shooting in the border town of El Paso, Texas on Saturday, which claimed the lives of 20 people and left 26 more injured.
The suspect in the case reportedly posted to 8chan a 2,300-word racist “manifesto”, in which he ranted against Latino immigration, just 20 minutes before launching the attack.
This morning, Cloudflare announced that it would no longer provide denial-of-service attack protection for the web site, saying:

The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.

Google removed the site from its index a few years ago, due to allegations about child abuse material.
At this point, it’s not clear whether Tucows also ejected 8chan, or whether its owners decided to jump ship, perhaps sensing which way the wind is blowing.
Its new home, Epik, calls itself the “Swiss bank” of domain registrars, and has actively courted sites that enable far-right political views.
The registrar openly sought the business of Gab.com, the Twitter clone used largely by those who have been banned by Twitter, after GoDaddy suspended the site’s domain last November.
In March this year, Epik CEO Rob Monster came under fire for publicly doubting the veracity of the video of the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 50 people.
8chan was also frequented by the perpetrator of that attack, among others.
Epik is described as “cornering the market on websites where hate speech is thriving”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-racist group.
Monster has said that he does not support the views of extremists, but merely wants to provide a platform where registrants can exercise their rights to free speech.

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Comments (4)

  1. Data Glasses says:

    Takes more courage to stand up against something you know is wrong than to simply allow is to just keep happening

  2. Matt Williams says:

    Come on now – no way. It’s not just random text floating around these sites, it’s people’s promises to kill which has been proven time and time again now; these sites kill.

  3. Jay Westerdal says:

    Yelling fire in a crowded theater is not free speech. Where do you draw the line and who should draw it? I would argue that we would have the wild west if we don’t allow the government to set the line and hold the line. Registrars are not the right judgment body. This is such a slipper slope. Sure we can all agree to ban an extremist, we start moving the line and before you know it breastfeeding mothers are banned. Pulitzer prize winning photos start getting banned. Next thing you know, you live in a country with no free speech. Speech is controlled by investors and corporations. Is it that hard to stretch that those companies will enforce/pass rules that you can’t criticism them. Actually that has already started to happen. Epik is doing the correct thing. If ICANN passed these same rules as some registrys and registrars then DomainIncite would be shut down too.

  4. Patrick says:

    Yet YouTube allows commenters to make death threats against Paul Joseph Watson because they have declared him a dangerous individual.
    I remember a protest a long time ago,it was neo- Nazis in new York, a Jewish fellow was interviewed and he said, I do not stand for what they believe in but I stand for their right to say it otherwise we live in a dictatorship,suck it up speech can be uncomfortable.

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