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Fredrick Brennan created the web forum called 8chan in 2013. It was meant to be a bastion of pure free speech, unlike its namesake 4chan which had become too stifling. Anything you wanted to say, no matter how horrible or toxic, would be not only condoned but welcomed. Brennan got what he wished in spades––in 2015, Brennan gave up control of the site. Now, he just wants to be free of it.

“Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, ‘All right, we have to research if there’s an 8chan connection,’” Brennan told the New York Times. There often is. The El Paso shooter uploaded his manifesto to 8chan, as did the New Zealand shooter and the California synagogue shooter.

Given those connections, Brennan has a solution: “Shut the site down. It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”

Cloudfare, a web security company, seems to agree. They announced that they would no longer provide security services for 8chan, which has already suffered outages. The writing may be on the wall for that website, but if it closes there is bound to be another.

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