8chan, the anarchic internet forum that disappeared in August, came back online this weekend as 8kun. This time, thanks to a decentralized web hosting network, it intends to stay online, no matter who its content offends.
Following back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, hosting service Cloudflare severed ties with 8chan, blaming its raucous community of anonymous posters for inciting the violence.
“8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate,” said Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince on the day it terminated service. Other major hosting providers, including Tencent and AliBaba in China, followed. For these corporate giants, 8chan amounted to little more than a pungent mix of pornography, extremism, and race-baiting, and hence not a brand with which they wanted to be associated.
Yet while its many detractors saw 8chan as a vortex of fringe politics and looney-tune conspiracy theories, others defended it as a beacon of free speech in an age of political correctness and corporate media consolidation. Alongside the terrorist manifestos, there were WikiLeaks-style document dumps.
