For the past week, a battle has been raging in the dark corners of the internet. It’s a fight between the owners of the hate-filled message board 8chan, who are trying to revive the controversial website, and the site’s founder, who is doing everything in his power to keep the site — and QAnon — offline.
Ever since 8chan was de-platformed in August, in the wake of the El Paso shooting, the company who owns the site, NT Technology, has been promising to bring it back. Last week it unveiled 8kun as the successor to 8chan, and has been trying to get its old users back on board.
In recent days, 8kun.net has briefly flickered online before disappearing again, thanks mostly to the work of 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan, who has been pressuring hosting and networking companies to drop support for the site.
Brennan is clear about why he never wants 8chan and 8kun to come back online: QAnon.
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In a series of off-the-wall videos posted on YouTube this week, Jim Watkins said he was aiming to get the site live by Thursday, Oct. 17, but that effort failed when a UK-based provider he had been using, Zare, dropped support.
“We are not willing to provide services to 8chan or 8kun,” Zare spokesman Harry Beasant told VICE News. “We have had no contact with anyone called Jim Watkins. I can only assume the details used when they signed up were fake, which is why we were not aware they were on our network until informed.”
On Friday, NT Technology revealed a new strategy to try and get 8kun back online and keep it there.
In the early hours of Friday morning, 8kun.net came online briefly, and analysis of its traffic shows that it was being routed through the cloud computing services of Tencent and Alibaba, two of China’s biggest tech companies.
The irony of the operators of a free-speech website using servers based in the world’s most heavily-censored online spaces was not lost on Brennan.
“All posts, and all IP information, everything, are going to be sent directly to the Chinese Communist Party because that is a requirement of a Chinese ISP,” Brennan said.
NT Technology, Alibaba and Tencent did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Remember why, specifically, the Bill of Rights was written...remember its purpose. It was written to limit the power of government over the individual.
There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.
