#8chan has been offline since @voxility pulled support for Bitmitigate/Epik yesterday. I’ve been told the site will be releasing a statement soon to give an update on the current situation
Here’s Jim Watkins, owner of #8chan, speaking about the El Paso shooting and working with the FBI
Watkins says #8chan has been accused by “some less than credible journalists” of protecting those posting illegal speech on its platform.
Says there are 1 million users of #8chan and describes it as “an empty piece of paper to write on.” and says it is disturbing that it can be so easily shut down...
Says @eastdakota’s decision to drop support for #8chan was taken in part because Cloudflare has an IPO coming up
Wow, Watkins says the manifesto posted to #8chan was not posted by the shooter. “It was not uploaded by the murderer, that is clear.” That’s not what the evidence shows, as @IwriteOK details here bellingcat.com/news/americas/…
Watkins suggests it was #8chan that flagged the manifesto to law enforcement.
The shutdown of #8chan “has forced a lot of other people to find other places to talks. It has dispersed the peacefully assembled group of people talking. It has silenced them."
On @eastdakota and #CloudFlare Watkins sums up: "I hold no animosity towards him or his cowardly and not thought out actions."
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Loomer likely first came onto Trump's radar for disrupting a version of Julius Caesar in Central Park in 2017 that had a Trump-like figure in the lead role.
She was arrested, but critically, she was also interviewed by Trump's favourite TV star at the time, Sean Hannity
2/8
Loomer worked for a number of far-right disinfo outlets (including InfoWars) but in 2020 decided to run for Congress. After she won the GOP primary, Trump praised her publicly, but it wasn't enough to win the general election.
The plan was written in late August 2023 by Moscow-based company Social Design Agency. The company founder Ilya Gambashidze shared his plans with high-ranking officials in the Kremlin, and notes obtained by the FBI show Putin was among those being briefed.
2/11
Central to the plan was not trying to convince Americans that Russia was great, but to expose America's darkest fears
"They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream.' It is these sentiments that should be exploited," Gambashidze wrote.
Back in 2014, the harassment campaigns were aimed at games developers and commentators who sought to broaden women’s place in gaming.
Those tactics eventually “became embedded into the MAGA movement” and “seeped into the fabric of US democracy,” says @AttorneyNora
2/6
At the, time, the person who saw the terrible potential of Gamergate was Steve Bannon
“What he tried to do with Gamergate was really standardize those tactics so that many more people understood how to do gender trolling or race trolling as a political tactic.” @BostonJoan said
3/6
In Telegram channels, neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been discussing ways to spread their message to new audiences, and even recruit new members.
And one platform is targeted above any other: #TikTok
Neo-Nazi are sharing tips on how to spread their content on TikTok, using coded language, symbols and altered images and videos to circumvent TikTok's content moderation policies.
The content is overtly racist, including pro-Hitler videos and Holocaust denial posts
2/6
@ISDglobal researcher @NateTheDoctor found a single neo-Nazi account on TikTok and from here built out a network of several hundred accounts, just by manually reviewing accounts and videos.
The network is global and interconnected, sharing and boosting each others videos.
3/6
In the space 24 hours, a false story about Volodymr Zelensky's wife buying a $5M Bugatti Tourbillon spread at warp speed across the internet from from an unknown AI-powered French website to the top search result of Google