Killing 8chan: The Heart of Modern Nazi Terrorism [CW]

CW: extreme language, slurs

The forum known as 8chan (8ch) is not just Susan’s racist grandpa, it’s the center of the most extreme branch of modern white-nationalism and wannabe right-wing terrorist death squads. They will no doubt take this as a compliment and object only to the fact that they’re “wannabe” death squads, insisting that they’ve already begun. This is true of course. Accounts of internet-bred white nationalist terrorism are on the rise and meanwhile there are countless threads on 8ch dedicated to arming yourself and preparing for the time when you will be called upon to form your own death-squad.

I can’t count the number of threads I’ve seen with people discussing what bureaucratic or ultra-violent job they would want in their fantasy of the coming white-power overthrow. Or even just ways to get away with killing trans people and other minorities now. They have a fetish for the extreme minutiae, discussing things like modernizing Auschwitz and world-building with esoteric Evola meets internet troll culture inspired kekistani religions. This is the kind of place where mass shooters are born. Just visiting 8ch would probably be enough to get an accessory or conspiracy charge if the feds ever decided to care about white terrorism.

The users are very conscious of being the vanguard that births white supremacy into the acceptable window of mainstream discourse, or Overton Window. The worst memes usually come from them and they run countless meme pages on mainstream social media sites like Twitter. You may have noticed that more and more explicitly white supremacist candidates are running for political office.

Through a modified search you can see a run-down of the various candidates that 8ch users have advocated and organized for. Many of them are even happy to support candidates they know will lose, such as the white-supremacist Patrick Little or the pedo and nazi Nathan Larson, just to shift public opinion and create openings for their world. But sometimes they back candidates that win such as the open neo-nazi, Arthur Jones. They’re messy with infighting and purity spirals but some of them are very strategic, self-actualized fascists.

They also take an interest in individual cases of cruelty. In one thread they were plotting ways to convince Chelsea Manning to kill herself, which she nearly did, in part as the result of such trolling. Elsewhere they go on various campaigns to destroy the livelihoods of people they deem enemies such as one person in Berkeley who they went so far in their doxx as to begin sending edited nazi porn propaganda with the person in it to their families workplaces and bosses. In the past they’ve called the feds on innocent people — particularly female gamers and their advocates during GamerGate — in a tactic known as swatting and even tried to set people up for crimes like pedophilia and drug sales.

I’m sorry if this is shocking but it’s real. This place is the rancid core of whiteness and the beating heart of modernized fascism. It’s our Weimar nazi beer-halls if they had instant access to every other geographically isolated piece of shit on the planet. It’s a tightly interconnected ecosystem of ultranationalism, repackaged traditionalism, fascist mysticism, misogyny, racism, transphobia, and hardly veiled fetishes for genocide, terrorism, and one-off slaughter.

What is 8ch?

Structurally 8ch is just an average forum where users are basically anonymous. While anonymity itself is an important aspect of internet freedom, when combined with the culture of 8ch /pol/, it creates this cesspit. The forum is host to a lot of different kinds of boards from all over the world (such as the Arabic board “edgyptians”) on a wide range of topics from video games, anime, and guns to vore, waifus, and hacking. They host a lot of political tendencies including a thread devoted to some pretty sketchy leftist tendencies called /leftypol/. In general though, 8ch is the place where all the failed niche nationalisms go to frolic in their own muck.

Most of the pol people tend to be somewhat pro-capitalist statists or libertarians, but there are also national-anarchists and a lot of Strasserite left-national socialists (nazbol). The nazbol people are largely communist nazis or advocates of a “red-brown alliance.” It’s the home of many “Maybe you can but should you?” sub-ideologies such as primitivist-nazbol (nazbol that wants to destroy civilization) and other such word soup. Paranoid prepper is definitely a common theme as are the technocratic, neoreactionary, silicon-valley, dark-enlightenment types. Religiously they are most commonly hardcore Christian or viking-fetishizing Pagans.

It all started when reddit began cracking down on nazis in the /pol/ subreddit in the wake of GamerGate. They then fled to an older forum called 4ch /pol/. The most extreme members of 4ch ultimately moved to 8ch /pol/ and began referring to the 4ch and people like Richard Spencer as “alt-light” for not embracing enough of the macho ultra-violence that characterizes their inane sociopathic incel dreams. They were the source of some of the most notorious acts associated with the GamerGate phenomena, where they first found their ability to transform trolling into violence in the real world.

In this archived thread you can see one member state what he sees as the ultimate goals of the 8ch project. He describes the methods by which they will make a tracking database of:

“Everyone who has and still is taking part in the slow destruction of white cultures, races and countries through a multitude of means including, but not limited to: spreading propaganda, race-mixing, economic warfare, establishing degenerate policies, physically attacking whites, participating in mass activities (rallies, social media) propagating anti-white actions and so on. This means, the List is not just limited to the garden variety leftist, but every banker, journalist, social media sheep, boss, co-worker, neighbor and so on.”

And what do they want to do with this list? Let’s not paraphrase:

How can this List be abused by evil people? Let’s not talk about that, since it is not our business, but if you really want to know. People could for example:

>form s.o. purge squads in a urban unrest scenario, hunting people with various political leanings or based on their past actions

>one could look up their co-worker and fire him upon finding him on the list

>someone could possibly check the mudshark-o-meter of their current date

>concentrated information warfare efforts could be established using more personal notes based on the list

>pressure people on the list, by simply pointing out their entry on it, since people rather like to stay in the shadows if they propagate the death of a race (anti-white, e.g.)

>after political turmoil and political shit, the List could be used to segregate people and make them ‘pay’ for their actions, down to their most distant relative.

>when technology progresses, facial recognition could come in handy in junction with mobile devises [sic], making evil people aware of others past and current political actions.

Let’s break this down a bit. He’s trying to have a little bit of plausible deniability, but he is advocating methods for making a list of fifth-column scapegoats and killing them all, including for things like “race-mixing.” They constantly harp about these “urban unrest scenarios” which they believe would give them the chance to begin building towards their goals.

Most of the details of such plans happen in secret threads on other mediums, but generally they are all in agreement that it needs to be done and they have already created such lists, focused on people they consider to be antifa. Until they are able to create their brown-shirt, steroid injected Proud Boy squads, they want to use things like doxxing and electronic warfare that can be done from the safety of their own homes.

They are efficient at mobilizing dispersed networks with obsessive attention to detail to find, expose, and destroy people. They are also incredibly wrong sometimes leading to things like swatting the wrong house, but nonetheless when they want to destroy you, they do their best.

They also have a fair number of hackers who are happy to try and get things like credit card numbers and amazon accounts to continue the mayhem.

Whenever there is a murder that is connected back to the alt-right, you can safely assume that 8ch played a part in it. Whether through direct propaganda and radicalization or through indirect Overton style methods. They are a major contributor to white terrorism. So they have these lists already, they’re already killing people, and they’re already engaging in electronic warfare. Their attempted coup has already begun.

What I Did and Why

I’ve been on and off 8ch for multiple years. Mostly I would just check it when I knew a big wave of doxxes was coming (such as during a major confrontation between antifa and fascists) to try and warn people but also I used it to study the culture of modern nazidom.

The nerdy antifascists like myself who have been infiltrating and studying nazi communities for many years saw this recent upsurge in more explicit white-supremacy coming and tried to warn people… mostly to no avail. Cruising boards like 8ch /pol/ gave us this glimpse into a culture so gross that we struggled to even find the words to describe it. Most people that we tried to talk about it really couldn’t handle the reality of what was going on and remain in denial about the threat. Now people know that the resurgence of white-supremacist movements is real, but they still don’t understand the scope and depth of it. That’s why I started this project. It’s a tightrope to discuss extreme fascist movements. You don’t wanna platform or normalize them, but nor do you want to contribute to their safety by letting them hide in obscurity. You want to and must destroy them from all angles at once.

In order to expose them and analyze these trends, I wrote some code that would allow me to scrape the pol forum and look at the ways they use language. With my tool I made a database of over 60,000 words that I pulled every few days for about a couple months. The board /pol/ alone has around 4 million posts per year.

In my analysis I excluded a bunch of very common and uninteresting words such as “the” and “when” so that I could focus on more telling uses of language. I did not, however, cull the data so much as to make it seem worse than it is. I kept most all adjectives and even most pronouns to give a better sense of how often they’re using various words relative to other words. I then made frequency counts to determine which words are most popular.

Nazis are Racist??!!

Groundbreaking, I know, but hear me out. The way they use language tells us a lot about what they’re up to and how they think. For instance, we know that they are deeply obsessed with the mythical but structurally privileged category of “whiteness.” They use the word “white” more than they employ most common-use pronouns. If I combined it with the other 20 usages of the word “whites” they use it more than the pronoun “he” which aside from the deleted term “I” is their most popularly used pronoun. This doesn’t even count the other related usages of phrases such as “pro-white” or “anti-white.”

Masculinity

The fact that they use the words related to masculinity so often such as “he,” “his,” “him,” and “men” is also interesting. The pronouns “she” and “her” didn’t even make the cut of this graph. Whenever I would interact with the forum they would always (wrongly) assume I was a man whether because I spoke confidently or just because I was in their den to begin with. They advocate the extreme patriarchal traditionalism of Jordan Peterson after a month-long meth binge.

This is a movement so deeply misogynistic and patriarchal it makes the Handmaid’s Tale look liberal. This hatred of women is of course going to create mass-shooters. The vast majority of /pol/ users are men. The Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) and incel communities — and the killers they spawn — have a big mutual crossover with /pol/ and the alt-right for these reasons. That’s why you can also see the term mgtow (Men Going Their Own Way) — which is a moniker for a movement rooted in rape and outright hatred of women — showing up with some frequency as well. Fascist traditionalism is pretty rapey and infected by toxic masculinity it turns out. Shocking, I know.

Anti-Semitism

Another interesting thread of this data is the anti-semitism and German LARPing. It’s no secret that 8ch worships hitler and sees themselves as continuing his project. But within this list of commonly used words we see the German word, “der” which means “the” or “of the.” When we dig into it’s usage we find that it’s most commonly used by German speakers on this English board or LARPing non-Germans using the phrase “der Jude” to signify that something is from or controlled by Jews. This crossover is very telling. It shows that the active nazi-underground in Germany and its diaspora is still inspiring followers abroad and that these westerner’s are provable wannabe mini-Hitlers. The word “hitler” itself is used 68 times.

It is no surprise then that we see the phrase “jews” also ranking so highly. If I had chosen to combine the words “jews” (used 81 times), “jew” (43 times), and “jewish” (55 times) they would have ranked as the fourth most popular word just beneath “his” and above “my.” To establish some form of baseline I gathered 6,000 random English tweets and analyzed how often they used the word “jew” in any part of a word or phrase.

As compared to this baseline data we have a ratio of 8ch at 0.004936 to twitter at 0.00138 which is about a 3.6 times higher usage rate. Anti-Semitism and it’s related pantheon of outlandish conspiracy theories very clearly remains one of the critical backbones of modern white-supremacist terrorism including the red-brown crossover of the anti-semitic left. Combining the words “kike” (44 times) and “kikes” (41 times) would put it just above the word “jews” on this graph and well within the threshold of most common words.

They are also consistently frothing at the mouth, flat-earther level Holocaust deniers and consistently refer to it with terms like the “holohoax.” This is not to imply that 8ch isn’t also anti-black, anti-brown, anti-queer, etc. But it is important to note that anti-Semitism is just beneath whiteness itself as their peak focal point.

Other Slurs

Although most slurs did not make this top list of words, they are just beneath the surface. The n-word (when combined with its plural) was used 59 times. This runs parallel to the word “black” and “blacks” which come in at 66 times. Following /pol/ for years it is a deeply anti-black space. It proliferates in the images and comments.

They believe every stereotype about black people and question any positive narrative about even individual black people. In one thread I watched someone say they saw an African-American male help someone who had been hit on their bike and the rest of /pol/ just dogpiled on the commenter saying they were lying. They make constant references to lynching and hanging and openly encourage a return to slavery. They literally believe that black people are a subspecies and will happily tell you about it. Despite this, you will on rare occasion see comments from people who are supposedly black, supporting the fascist traditionalism of /pol/ and even, at times, it’s notions of racial superiority. There is also a non-negligible Latin American and Asian user-base on 8ch as a whole and /pol/ specifically. This coincides strangely with their ever present fetishization of asians with constant hentai and waifu references. While regularly talking about hating asians and making fun of white-supremacists like Richard Spencer for dating Asian women, they simultaneously swim in their closeted fetishes and the recognition that much of their deeply-dodgy race “science” actually suggests that Asians are the most intelligent race.

The word “faggot” comes in various forms at 41 times including the phrase “normalfags” which refers to anyone not sharing in their extreme views. They are widely of the belief that all trans people and queers are mentally deranged and deserve to be killed immediately.

Despite this you still see aspects of queer communities flocking towards authoritarian-nationalist ideals and occasionally showing out in these and other alt-right threads. Much has been speculated about why a minority of particularly white gay men and trans-women have at times participated in these movements that would surely murder them at the first chance they got. Regardless of why, these purge squads are poised to and already beginning to inspire a resurgence of gay-bashing, calling for the importance of projects like “Bash Back” and the “Pink Pistols.”

Amongst other slurs are a wide and creative range of ableist, anti-brown, and Islamophobic screeds. Almost every time a slur is used it is preceded by the prominent term “fucking” to drive home the degree of hatred.

Pedophilia

There is also a consistent long-term battle between the elements of the 8ch movement that support pedophilia and the elements that oppose it. Long, spirited debates go down in the 8ch /pol/ threads about age of consent like it’s a group of anarcho-capitalists (ancaps) at a Libertarian Party convention.

This is no coincidence. Many of the people on /pol/ do identify as Libertarians and ancaps and are seeking to create in-roads in the Libertarian Party’s big-tent policy of desperately platforming every edgy weirdo with an opinion. Many of the people on 8ch see age of consent laws as being the result of feminism and queerness obstructing their alpha-lobster masculinity or some such other nonsense. This isn’t to say that everyone there agrees. Many are vehemently against pedophilia and, ironically, also see it as the result of things like feminism and queerness. There are “loli” boards on 8ch devoted to cartoon pedo porn. Google unlisted 8ch for its supposed role in sharing actual child porn and the founder defended their hosting of child porn as an inevitable result of free speech.

Politics and War

All instances of the word “Trump” come in at around 140 times. There is of course a clear connection here between Trumpism and the more extreme manifestations of the white-terrorism movement burgeoning on 8ch and elsewhere. On 8ch they were excited about Trump even though, unlike much of the more mainstream alt-right movement, they feel he is not nearly extreme enough. They constantly make fun of the white supremacists who think that he will represent them. They don’t worship him like so much of the alt-right does. They just see him, for what he is: a useful pawn in their movement.

This can be seen in incidents such as when Trump retweeted an anti-Semitic meme of Hillary with a Star of David and money behind her that was created on 8ch. Even this pales in comparison to the deranged “we are Q” conspiracy rabbit hole that is now catching fire in mainstream media that comes directly from the bizarre imagination of 8ch. It’s an elaborate conspiracy about government insiders trying to destroy Trump’s credibility and you can now glimpse it on shirts and signs at all of Trump’s events.

When we see the word “war” coming in at 67 times it reflects their craving for violence and what they often refer to as “urban unrest scenarios.” They lust for widespread violence. They generally side with the sort of patriot and three-percenter movement rhetoric about the coming civil war, FEMA camps, and Jewish/Muslim cultural-marxist takeover even though they can no longer pretend that Obama is doing it (although it doesn’t stop them from trying). They believe that if they keep pushing the Overton window of what they can get away with, eventually a state of emergency and civil war will break out, at which point all of their little splinter cells can start to activate and stage a total takeover or at least secure a large territory.

Of course they don’t actually have anywhere near the organization nor movement unity to accomplish such a thing, but the effects of them trying can be nonetheless terrifying. One of the ways they encourage these scenarios is by claiming all white-supremacist murderers as “one of us.” This is a way of saying, we back what he did and encourage others to do it. They want these one-off shooters to continue to escalate things and encourage the exposure of their views. Every time one of the murderers gets linked to the alt-right or a chan network they cheer it on.

Of course what they didn’t anticipate was that the primarily leftist communities that oppose them would be so wildly effective in pushing them back into the corners at every turn. So while they broadened the Overton window for white-supremacist violence, they also inadvertently made antifascist defense much more normalized. Plus, leftists and anarchists have much deeper experience with actually organizing movements, even if we do not have the monopoly of violence and cruelty.

Their fetishization of civilizational collapse and urban unrest scenarios is very reminiscent of a group that they speak highly of called “The Atomwaffen Division (AWD)” who are a network of autonomous National-Socialist terror cells that spread from the U.S. to Canada. The AWD is an accelerationist movement that believes they can bring about their vision through random acts of terrorism and murder and seeks to target major civilizational infrastructure as well as carry out individual killings of minorities. They run weapons trainings and recently celebrated one of their members for killing a gay college student. Like some of the old off-forum threads formerly run by 8ch members, most of their organizing was happening on Discord servers until they got leaked and exposed. Some of the deepest goals they posses are hidden from online forums as epitomized by what one organizer said: “Don’t talk about the group’s terrorist ambitions in online chats or on social media.” Despite this though, not only do some members of 8ch speak approvingly about the AWD, members of the organization also recruit and encourage 8ch members to form their own cells.

Empathy and Ideology

One particularly strange thread underlines some of their “theoretical underpinning” if you can call it that. A user (probably from /leftypol/) started a thread saying that the left perceives the 8ch pol people as being basically psychopathic and asked if they were capable of empathy. While most made some version of the argument, “I’m not sociopathic or psychopathic, I just only like white people and my close tribe.” some were more blunt and self-aware admitting to their own violent tendencies and inability to empathize.

One user wrote:

I consider myself a psychopath and believe myself to be in the top 5% of psychopathy among non-Jewish whites. Among Jews I consider myself in the top 60% for psychopathy, and many that I’ve met I would consider to be significantly more psychopathic than myself. The ones I met in prison are capable of a level of deceit and malice that I don’t believe even really exists among my race….I actually relate to Jews in a way. I have some vague empathy for my own race, because I see ourselves having a shared destiny, and we are only strong if we are strong as a group, but I have to hold myself back from swindling them as I do see many members of my race as dumb and gullible. I think most whites have too much empathy. It may be beneficial when in closed homogenous groups, but it does not benefit you when your communities have out-group free-riders like Jews that are higher in psychopathy and prey on people that have empathy. Jews know that they can manipulate them by appealing to higher ideals, and stuff of that nature, and they seem to be able to use those ideals to manipulate the majority of whites at will.

This gives you a sense of the level of discourse and sheer off-the-rails conspiracy theory meets hyper racist predilections towards violence that are commonplace on 8ch. The fact that others would consistently reframe the original post by saying that they do feel empathy but only for their tribe, gets into the ideology behind what they’re saying. They’re on a fundamentalist branch of collectivism and see the world as zero-sum. They think that war, if not already occurring, is inevitable and that it’s essential to build a tribe that will survive. But rather than following their misunderstanding of Darwinian natural selection to its conclusion and picking a team based on merit, they just hang their hat on the vague and shaky notion of whiteness. They are incapable of realizing the lessons of so many game-theorists and evolutionary scientists in the last few decades (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) that deeply reinforce the possibility and necessity of realizing a non-zero sum world.



They are seemingly incapable of the rudimentary skill of meaningful cooperation. What’s almost more sad and frightening, is that they don’t have the capacity for empathy beyond a tribe. They see anyone not in their immediate circle as a threat. To them, the whole world is a warzone where all they can do is kill first. It’s not just a critical lack of imagination, it’s also the paranoid ramblings of someone who would stab anyone in the back if they saw it as even nominally shifting their position in the endless rat-race for power.

To them, love is a tool for power. To us, it’s a tool for freedom.

Dangerously Mediocre

In addition to all kinds of scariness, it’s important also to mention exactly how mediocre 8ch is. It’s the human equivalent of the magazines in your dentist’s but– if it’s even possible– more tryhard. That they consider themselves to be an intellectual vanguard is on par with a grown adult self-identifying as Rick from Rick and Morty. It’s laughably pathetic and sad.

That they see themselves as the rightful heirs to evolutionary dominance just means that their denial is as dense as their ability to recognize patterns. They whine and moan about how repressed their speech is but when given the freedom they pine for, they produce such slobbering drivel. The aggregated impact of manchild mediocrity can still be very dangerous though. According to one poster there’s less than 3,000 active users on /pol/ (that of course ignores the iceberg of lurkers). That’s a lot of mass-murdering psychopaths, but for the internet being a place where you could easily find >100k people willing to actively engage in shipping count chocula and captain crunch, 3k ain’t nothing. It’s a good sign that /pol/ isn’t an order of magnitude larger and more coherent.

Semiotics and Images

Like all of meme culture, 8ch is built on a constant tribal in-group signalling. This usually takes the form of deeply layered memes and phrases that show that one is virtuous relative to the echo chamber that they’ve built for themselves. /Pol/ sees themselves as heirs to a deeply intellectually rigorous tradition. It’s important to understand that they see themselves this way, regardless of how far it veers from reality, because it explains much of the culture and how it interacts with people outside of itself. Rather than discussing the endless gigabytes of racist cartoons they bathe in, I’m going to focus on one example.

A particularly interesting example of this type of culture, which extends beyond 8ch and into the broader alt-right movement, is the kekistani flag. Without wasting words explaining the bizarre, semi-ironic religion of kek according to the alt-right, one of its symbols is a flag modeled after the iron-cross flag of the nazi war machine. It features a red background with a sideways cross, a swastika, and the iron cross. The /pol/ version is almost identical except for the green background, and the iron-cross is replaced by the 4ch symbol (a reference to the history of /pol/) with the swastika replaced by intersections of the word kek.





The flag has moved increasingly from a niche online thing, to a widely printed flag that shows up at practically every alt-right and Proud Boy gathering. They insist it’s just designed to trigger liberals when confronted in public. They use distorted dog whistles like “free speech,” “triggered,” and “SJWs” and minimize with statements like, “it’s only a symbol” or “it’s just a joke.” That’s their brilliant plan in a nutshell.

The practice of: “1) do a nazi thing but change it up a little, 2) make fun of anyone who challenges you for being sensitive, 3) repeat” is the super rationalist brainy plot it took them years and millions of words to invent. Almost no one is fooled, except for a noisy cadre of liberals who praise tolerance above practical safety concerns for minorities. The people who fall for this trick are extremely dangerous though, as they often platform and protect these people who utilize the opportunity to literally mobilize killers. When they make these performances, they’re saying, “Let’s kill more people this time. Come join me.” And some people will heed the call. The more people who hear them, the more people come.

Because the United States still has some “kill nazis” spirit stirring in it’s bones, these fascists still have to slightly obscure when confronted. Even groups like the National Socialist Movement took the swastika off of their flags so that they could play this same game. Places like 8ch are the safe-spaces where they can just plot genocide in peace and not have to pretend like they’re trolling or resort to a wide range of logical fallacies and manipulative argumentation strategies such as the motte-and-bailey. When their fairy-tale land of machismo crawls out of the internet sewers and reaches the light of day, they are forced to deal with how absurdly out of touch with reality and basic human empathy they have become. Even if they’re dangerous, they look like a goddamn joke. And a pretty funny joke at that.



Killing 8ch

Every friendship formed and joke shared on 8ch is a credible threat to violence. Fighting 8ch is equivalent to fighting an inbound genocide. They have shown both a willingness and ability to commit fundamentalist violence both in a sustained way that aims at overthrowing the current world-order but also through large-scale insurrectionary attacks and terrorist mass-shootings. Risks taken as part of the effort to cull the world of this spawn are equivalent to lives saved in the near and long-term. We need to burn it to the ground and salt the earth beneath it. We should also kill or render unusable any sproutlings they try to hide behind such as gab.ai or the various infinity-chan iterations. Most people should not go to 8ch. Don’t give them the traffic. But if you do, have the fight in mind.

Advertisers

Sites like 8ch make their money to pay their server and other fees largely through advertising money so naturally this is a first step in resistance. Simply reach out to their advertisers with some alarming screenshots of their products next to nazidom and let them know how bad for their business this is to be potentially publicly associated with terrorism. [EDIT: NordVPN has since said that they did not pay for the ad and have supposedly asked 8chan to take it down.] For example, one would imagine that NordVPN would love to pull their ads when they’re contacted about running there and look like this literally beneath a swastika.

Most of the rest of their advertisers seem to be for things like Japanese sex toys but it’s worth trying regardless. Their advertising is controlled through softserve.

Technical Support

Although no one should ever do illegal things unless they are certain they are ethical, 8ch can be hacked. They’ve been successfully attacked before and are regularly still attacked. The entire structure of the site is notoriously buggy and we know they’ve had a wide range of problems with their databases. Furthermore, their server configurations are historically very, very sloppy.

The server for 8ch is owned by Jim Watkins and run by his son Ron Watkins and the company, N.T. Technology (domains@nttec.com, 1-425-259-3201) and their internet services division is, according to them, at 200 Paul Ave, San Francisco, CA 94124. According to ARIN data they host their U.S. based servers at 9120 Double Diamond Parkway, Suite 5901, Reno NV, 89521. Whether this information is still accurate could be determined by going in person to the building and investigating or calling them.

Jim Watkins is pretty much the heart of 8ch. He’s their largest bankroller and most consistent supporter. He himself though actually lives on a pig farm just outside of Manila in the Philippines.

Their site is protected by cloudflare who will likely not respond but it’s worth telling them that they’re protecting child porn and terrorist groups. Cloudflare is based in San Francisco. You can also send specific reports to ICANN which probably won’t work either but we do know that it at least annoys Jim.

There are a lot of possibilities to spam the site and its emails (admin@8ch.net; dmca@8ch.net; ads@8ch.net; claim@8ch.net; apply@8ch.net) and it’s additionally quite easy to make a realistic sounding fake @8ch email address. Additionally, the threads themselves can be spammed. They will of course block the ip addresses of people who do so, but there are pretty easy workarounds.

Additionally, they are stuck in their own purity spirals of infighting that make the Left look like an advertisement for cooperative team-building across difference. They pretty much hate everyone who isn’t them. They will turn on just about anyone including each other. They even turn on some of their biggest supporters such as the nazi-hacker “weev” who helps run the daily stormer which has repeatedly been booted off the internet as the result of long-term campaigns. This infighting coupled with paranoia about feds and secret jews means that they are pretty wide open to disinformation campaigns geared towards creating mistrust especially amongst their higher ranking figures.

Additionally they seem worried about infiltration. This is especially true for their various off-8ch networks. They would also prefer that Global Volunteers not leak post history. What’s more, we know that they have ip logs. Many of which will be tor nodes and vpns, but the rest are largely nazi gps coordinates. Things like this certainly would require some dedicated social engineering except for that, Jim has left many of the logs in extremely leaky formats.

It’s also possible to track bitcoin and other crypto currency flows of 8ch and other white supremacist sites. There are many other identifying features that can be weeded out from careful study of various users who at times post pictures and make other such comments revealing location and possible workplaces or names. There’s a lot more to be said about the structure and vulnerabilities of the site but that stuff is better left private and the curious with shodan and nmap handy can find out for themselves.

Killing the Hydra

Sites like 8ch represent paradoxes. They’re both dangerous and completely nominal. They seem impenetrable, and yet also can come crashing down with sustained pressure.

In holding this complexity we must realize that we are fighting a hydra but just because chopping off one head doesn’t immediately kill the beast, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still do it while also constantly searching for the roots of the problem. The problem of white-supremacy is far deeper than any one forum but this gives us clues into how to fight it. We can kill 8ch, but we can also beat back fascism. Not only can we, we must.