Anonymous forum 8chan is back online after rebranding itself as 8kun

Sean Keane & Oscar Gonzalez
CNET
Mon, 04 Nov 2019 07:46 UTC

© 8chan

8chan is back, with a new name.

It is migrating boards from the old site, with one notable absence.

Anonymous internet forum 8chan has resurfaced under the name 8kun after going offline in early August, in the wake of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. The forum's return, as earlier reported by Gizmodo, was hinted at last month when the 8chan Twitter account revealed the new name.

The 8chan Twitter account noted over the weekend that it would continue to migrate boards from the old site, with 63 public ones active as of early Monday.

Jim Watkins, the owner of 8kun and 8chan, uploaded a video to YouTube on Saturday. In the video, Watkins said 8kun's traffic was already higher than expected.

"It is a fantastic amount of users who attempted to access at one time," he said in the video. "Although I expect setbacks and attacks, it is almost to the point already where no one man, corporation or government will be able to stifle us. Until that surprising trumpet sounds, it is likely that this movement will become unstoppable."

Cybersecurity service and content delivery for the new site will be handled by VanwaTech, based in Vancouver, Washington. On Oct. 30, VanwaTech CEO Nick Lim tweeted about the site's launch.

"I am confident that the team of people operating 8kun have made significant improvements to the operational nature, and moderation of their new website," Lim said. "Free speech, the internet, and the ability to communicate freely and legally, are some of the many pillars that serve as the foundation for America's success both past, present, and future."

8kun was registered Sept. 7 with Toronto-based Tucows, one of the largest domain registrars in the world. Tucows didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the site going live.

Still absent from 8kun is the "/pol/" board, where the alleged gunman posted a hateful screed prior to the Aug. 3 shooting that killed 22 people and injured 24 people in an El Paso Walmart.

Security platforms Cloudflare and Voxility pulled their support of 8chan after the shooting, effectively forcing the site to go dark.

The new site warns people not to post content that's illegal in the US, noting that it will be deleted and the poster banned. Site administrators didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Comment: Some more on the rebranding from RT:

The site has long been embroiled in controversy related to users posting neo-Nazi and other extremist ideological content, as well as child pornography and the manifestos of several recent, high-profile mass shooters, the reason for which it was shut down in August 2019. Despite this, it once ranked among the top 4,000 most-visited sites in the world.

The one-time bastion of free speech has introduced a highly important change to its terms of use: "Anything considered illegal in the United States will be removed."

During testimony before US Congress, Watkins vowed not to remove so-called (but ill-defined) hate speech, but insisted that no illegal speech (under US law), that explicitly calls for violence, would be allowed on the platform.

"My company has no intention of deleting constitutionally protected hate speech. I feel the remedy for this type of speech is counter-speech, and I'm certain that this is the view of the American justice system."

Since relaunching, the site has reportedly experienced a myriad of problems owing to spikes in traffic as well as targeted cyberattacks.

In the wake of the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio in August, the site was taken down when internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare withdrew its content delivery network (CDN) service.

El Paso shooter 21-year-old Patrick Crusius posted his anti-immigrant manifesto there shortly before his shooting spree while the livestream footage of the Christchurch terrorist attack was also posted to the subform and shared repeatedly.