Online hateHatechan: The Hate and Violence-Filled Legacy of 8chan

Published 8 August 2019

El Paso, Texas. Poway, California. Christchurch, New Zealand. Three White Power-inspired attacks by three white supremacists who posted paranoid racist manifestos right before the attacks. Three killing sprees. One targeted Muslims, another Jews, the third Hispanics. What they all had in common was 8chan. In just six years, 8chan has achieved a rather unenviable reputation as one of the vilest places on the Internet.

A mass shooting by a white supremacist at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on 3 August 2019, shocked Americans across the nation. The attack left 22 people dead and even more injured. Shortly before the attack,  alleged shooter Patrick Crusius is believed to have posted a manifesto on the website 8chan. The four-page screed was intended to provide a justification for his deadly spree.

It is not the first time a white supremacist killer has followed precisely this ritual.

In March 2019, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, allegedly posted a manifesto to 8chan before murdering 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand.

A month later, in April 2019, white supremacist John Earnest allegedly opened fire inside a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, killing one person and wounding three more before he surrendered. He, too, posted a manifesto to 8chan before his attack, which referred admiringly to Tarrant and to Robert Bowers, the mass shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018.

Three white supremacist manifestos. Three killing sprees. One targeted Muslims, another Jews, the third Hispanics. What they all had in common was 8chan.

In mid-April 2019, ADL’s Center on Extremism and the Network Contagion Research Institute conducted a study of 8chan and the social networking site Gab, analyzing on-line behavior in connection with killing sprees of Brenton Tarrant, who used 8chan, and Robert Bowers, who posted on Gab.

The investigation revealed that murderous, even genocidal, language was pervasive on 8chan, “suggesting the next Bowers or the next Tarrant could emerge at any moment.”

Those words turned out to be sadly prophetic.

Cesspool of Incitement
In just six years, 8chan has achieved a rather unenviable reputation as one of the vilest places on the Internet.

Imageboards are a type of online discussion forum centered around posting images, and 8chan began as an offshoot of the imageboard 4chan. They are typically anonymous, with no screen names. That anonymity allows people to post outrageous, disgusting or hateful photos and messages, ranging from hate speech to posts about pedophilia.

4chan, one of the oldest and most popular imageboards, launched in 2003 and introduced often wildly popular and contagious memes (many of which are still circulating today).  However, parts of 4chan—especially its Politically Incorrect board, known as pol or /pol/— developed a reputation for malicious, offensive and often hateful posts and memes.