8chan looks like a terrorist recruiting site after the New Zealand shootings. Should the government

Source: Washington Post

8chan looks like a terrorist recruiting site after the New Zealand shootings. Should the government treat it like one?

By Drew Harwell and Craig Timberg March 22 at 4:32 PM

As most of the world condemned last week’s mass shooting in New Zealand, a contrary story line emerged on 8chan, the online message board where the alleged shooter had announced the attack and urged others to continue the slaughter. “Who should i kill?” one anonymous poster wrote. "I have never been this happy,” wrote another. “I am ready. I want to fight.”

To experts in online extremism, the performance echoed another brand of terrorism — that carried out by Islamist militants who have long used the Web to mobilize followers and incite violence. Their tone, tactics and propaganda were eerily similar. The biggest difference was their ambitions: a white-supremacist uprising, instead of a Muslim caliphate.

As Facebook, YouTube and other tech companies raced to contain the sounds and images of the gruesome shooting, 8chan helped it thrive, providing a no-holds-barred forum that further propelled the extremism and encouraged new attacks.

The persistence of the talk of violence on 8chan has led some experts to call for tougher actions by the world’s governments, with some saying the site increasingly looks like the jihadi forums organized by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda — masters in flexing the Web’s power to spread their ideologies and recruit new terrorists. Critics of 8chan argue that the site, and others like it, may warrant a similar governmental response: close monitoring and, when talk turns to violence, law-enforcement investigation and intervention.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/22/chan-looks-like-terrorist-recruiting-site-after-new-zealand-shooting-should-government-treat-it-like-one/

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Related: Understanding 8chan, the self-proclaimed 'darkest reaches of the internet' (Washington Post)