Canadian internet services company Tucows stops hosting 8chan domain in wake of El Paso mass shooting

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The message board site 8chan, a hotbed of online extremism, is no longer registered with the Toronto-based internet services and telecommunications provider Tucows, the company confirmed in an email to the National Post late on Monday.

Tucows is just the latest company to scramble to disavow 8chan in the wake of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. Cloudflare, which provides internet infrastructure and security, also dropped 8chan on Monday. Tucows initially resisted. The company’s manager of public policy told The New York Times on Sunday that, “We have no immediate plans other than to keep discussing internally.”

The suspected El Paso shooter posted a racist, anti-immigration screed to 8chan minutes before opening fire on a busy Walmart store near the U.S.-Mexico border on Saturday, killing 22 people and injuring dozens of others. This was the third act of public violence linked to the site this year. The alleged perpetrator of the shooting that killed one person at a Poway, Calif., synagogue in April posted an anti-Semitic rant on 8chan in advance. The man who murdered 51 people at a Christchurch, New Zealand mosque was also an 8chan user. He posted links to his lengthy white supremacist manifesto and a Facebook livestream of the massacre to the site. The video was quickly saved and reposted by other users — showing that extremists are using 8chan as a sort of archiving service for content that would be taken down almost instantly from other sites. Users congregate on 8chan as mass atrocities are happening, cheering them on and openly hoping the shooter can beat the previous “high score” — using a video-game term for a real-life body count.

Reg Levy, head of compliance at Tucows, told the National Post the company is a wholesale registrar of more than 30 million domain names (web addresses), and usually does not know whether any given URL is under the company’s management.

At some point, Tucows became aware that one of its resellers owned the web address being used by 8chan. Sometime overnight Sunday or early in the morning Monday, the web address was transferred off of the company’s system. It is no longer registered with Tucows, Levy said.

Levy added that the move to sever ties was not her decision or the company’s and added Tucows co-operates with law enforcement and cannot make any further statements about ongoing investigations.

Levy said Tucows provides web hosting — that is, actual space to store a website’s content — to a smaller, select group of vetted clients, but not to 8chan, and added that her company was “definitely not in the business of wanting to be associated with” the site.

8chan’s search for a new online home is now on in earnest. Many different companies and service providers are involved in hosting a website and keeping it secure and online. After getting dumped by Cloudflare, 8chan announced it was striking a new deal with Epik.com and its security provider BitMitigate, which is known for providing security to The Daily Stormer, an online hub for neo-Nazis. However, BitMitigate rents servers from another company, Voxility, which promptly dropped 8chan’s content. The site remains offline.

Computer programmer Frederick Brennan started 8chan in 2013 but no longer controls the site. He has called for it to be shut down. 

The site’s current owner, Jim Watson, posted a YouTube statement Tuesday. He expressed his sadness at the news of mass shootings on Saturday in El Paso and on Sunday outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio (which did not involve 8chan). He stressed that website was working with law enforcement to provide any information that could be helpful. However, he said 8chan has “never protected illegal speech” as some “less than credible” journalists claim. He said, “It is unfortunate that this place of free speech has temporarily been removed. We are working to restore service.”

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