Epik will sponsor 8chan’s domain, but will not host its site
Controversial free-speech registrar Epik has said it will take 8chan’s domain name business, but will not provide content delivery services for the site.
In a post entitled “Epik draws line on Acceptable Use”, CEO Rob Monster wrote:
Upon careful consideration of the recent operating history of 8Chan, and in the wake of tragic news in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend, Epik has elected to not provide content delivery services to 8Chan. This is largely due to the concern of inadequate enforcement and the elevated possibility of violent radicalization on the platform.
He wrote that a “principal” of 8chan approached the company about transferring its domain to Epik on Monday.
The domain was in fact transferred, as DI reported shortly after it happened. Monster told DI that he had not actively solicited the site’s business.
While there’s no evidence its previous registrar, Tucows, had any intention of suspending the domain, its denial-of-service protection provider, CloudFlare, has publicly ditched 8chan and accused it of being responsible for the hate that lead to the El Paso shooting on Saturday.
8chan is a wild-west message board largely frequented by people with far-right views on race. It came in for extra scrutiny when it was reported that the El Paso terrorist posted a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto to the site shortly before the attack.
The site’s current owner, Jim Watkins, posted a surreal video to Twitter yesterday claiming, among other things, that the manifesto had in fact been posted by a third party.
Monster wrote that Epik was “reticent” about allowing 8chan to use its BitMitigate service to replace CloudFlare.
Its decision was moot anyway, as during the course of Monday speculation that 8chan would move to BitMitigate caused Epik’s service provider, Voxility, to sever ties with the company.
This caused BitMitigate to “temporarily” stop working for all of its customers, though regular domain registrants were not affected, Epik said.
Monster wrote that Epik will continue to provide services to all customers that publish legal content, but that it reserves the right to deny service in cases where the site’s owner has shown itself incapable of properly moderating user-generated content.
At time of writing, 8ch.net is not resolving at all for me.
After more racist shootings, take one guess which registrar 8chan just switched to
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:
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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