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Angry Assault
2019/08

8chan Owner Jim Watkins Requested To Appear Before Congress

OAG Staff

8chan has been blamed for the mass shootings that took place in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, despite the fact that the Ohio shooter was a Left-wing Antifa supporter. Even still, Homeland Security Chairman Bennie G. Thompson and Ranking Member Mike Rogers sought to beseech 8chan’s owner, Jim Watkins, to appear before Congress to answer questions as to why he isn’t censoring 8chan according to the whims of politicians.

The official House Homeland Security Committee posted the letter from Thompson and Rogers on August 6th, 2019, attaching the letter to the tweet.

If you’re unable to read the tiny print in the letter within the tweet, it states…

“Dear Mr. Watkins:

“As the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee on Homeland Security, we write in the wake of the August 3, 2019 domestic terrorist attack on in El Paso, Texas. This attack resulted in the needless deaths of 22 people and the senseless wounding of 24 others. According to media reports, the killer wrote a manifesto describing his anti-immigrant, white supremacist beliefs and appears to have posted it to your website, 8chan, minutes prior to the shooting.

“Regrettably, this is at least the third act of white supremacist extremist violence linked to your website this year. In April, the killer who murdered one Jewish worshiper and wounded three others at a synagogue in Poway, California, appears to have posted an anti-Semitic and racist open letter on 8chan shortly before carrying out the mass shooting. In March, the killer who murdered 51 Muslim worshipers and wounded 49 more at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, appears to have posted on 8chan a 74-page manifesto outlining his racist, white supremacist, anti-immigrant beliefs, as well as a link to a Facebook livestream of the massacre.

“On August 5, 2019, your network service provider, Cloudflare, called 8chan a “cesspool of hate” before suspending service. Fredrick Brennan, 8chan’s founder, called the site “a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there.” and called for 8chan to be shut down. Experts have described 8chan as a platform for amplifying extremist views, leading to the radicalization of its users.

“Americans deserve to know what, if anything, you, as the owner and operator, are doing to address the proliferation of extremist content on 8chan.

“To that end, the Committee on Homeland Security respectfully requests your presence to provide testimony regarding 8chan’s efforts to investigate and mitigate the proliferation extremist content, including white supremacist extremist content, on your website.

“Please provide the Committee with current physical contact information for you or your authorized representative in the United States so that you can receive communications from the Committee. […]”

The letter from Thompson and Rogers is filled with citations from The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the blog post from Cloudflare.

These sites have determined to smear 8chan because it’s one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet, especially after 4chan began banning and censoring certain topics and discussions that the Liberal moderators didn’t like.

Watkins did respond them and posted his e-mail message via Twitter, which you can read below.

Additionally, as reported by Reclaim The Net, Jim Watkins made a video outlining how the original El Paso, Texas shooter’s manifesto was uploaded to Instagram before 8chan.

This led to people wisely asking the House Homeland Security Committee’s Twitter account if they would have the executives from Instagram and Facebook appear before Congress since the El Paso, Texas shooter’s manifesto appeared on Instagram before 8chan.

However, CNET attempted to debunk Watkins’ claim by reaching out to Facebook, where they reported…

“A spokeswoman for Facebook said it disabled an Instagram account tied to the suspected gunman on Saturday. The account hadn’t been active for more than a year, she said.

“Instagram is working with law enforcement, she said, and she directed any additional questions to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI declined to comment.”

The FBI may have declined to comment because they may have been responsible for posting the manifesto on 8chan.

While that might sound like a wild conspiracy theory, the FBI mistakenly implicated themselves in the synagogue shooting by fedposting on 8chan, making ludicrous claims and egging on promotion of the shooting in order to catch someone making an incriminating post on the imageboard.

Oftentimes channers joke about FBI agents posting in the threads, calling them “fedposters”, but in the case of the synagogue shooting that took place in Poway, California, they were directly involved with trying to bait users on the board.

This kind of organized attempt to get 8chan shutdown – which resulted in Cloudflare and Voxility pulling out from the website and forcing them to use a Zeronet.io hash to continue operation – is just another step by both big tech and the government to silence free speech on the internet.

(Thanks for the news tip lucben999)

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