Thread by @vicenews

"If you're anything else, you're gonna get burned at the stake.”

This is how 8chan was born — and became the worst place on the Internet.

Watch 8chan: Hate and the Internet, a #VICENewsTonight Special Report now bit.ly/2lxTHbA

8chan is now known as the website where mass killers in New Zealand and El Paso shared their racist ideologies, but it didn't start that way.

It began as a haven for free speech — or at least that's what its founder believed it to be. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

Fredrick Brennan created 8chan in 2013, when he was 19. It was a lot like 4chan, another imageboard created by another teenager 10 years earlier, but it allowed users even more freedom. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

The original premise for both was simple: Users could upload photos while others commented with text or images of their own. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

Everyone was anonymous. Posts were deleted after a few days. The effect was that no single user could become famous. Everyone had equal power. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

4chan became known as the dark heart of the internet — a place to find weird porn, graphic violence, the darkest jokes. 8chan went even darker. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

To understand how a person could be angry enough to create a place like 8chan, you have to understand his life. Brennan has osteogenesis imperfecta, a disease that makes bones curved and weak. Brennan says he has broken a bone more than 100 times. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

By age 13, his right arm had broken so many times that he risked losing the use of it, so he decided to stay mostly in his wheelchair. The internet was an escape. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

He discovered 4chan when he was 12. “I was mesmerized,” Brennan said. “4chan was nothing like anything I’d ever seen.” bit.ly/2UzVmuG

He found a perverse satisfaction in seeing people using words like crippled. No one had ever called him that, but he thought, “This is what people are really thinking, and they’re lying in real life.” bit.ly/2UxRn1K

He decided to retreat into the online world, where he initially kept his disability secret. “When I started using 4chan heavily, my whole life became about the internet,” he said. “And my real life stopped mattering to me.” bit.ly/2UxRn1K

In 2013 he became the administrator of Wizardchan, a site for adult male virgins. A woman reached out to Fredrick, saying she had a devotee fetish, meaning a fetish for people with disabilities. She flew to New York to meet him. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

Being with her improved his self-esteem, he said, but that in turn damaged the relationship, because her fetish was for him to be sexually shy and insecure. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

Brennan later told friends in a group chat that he’d taken her to get an abortion, and that it was therapeutic, because “I wanted to have been aborted as a baby.” bit.ly/2UzVmuG

The relationship, in his telling, did not end well. But the woman had given him a set of new experiences that would shape the rest of his life — particularly psychedelic mushrooms. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

The mushroom trip was the first time he accepted the fact that he would always be disabled, and that it was OK. As he was coming down, he dreamed up 8chan. Days later, Brennan set it live. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

The site was a modest success until Gamergate. Gamergate was the moment in 2014 when internet trolls figured out how to act as a political movement. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

They claimed to be demanding “ethics in video game journalism,” but the core of their activism was harassing female game developers and critics. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

They threatened women, posted their personal information online, and sent SWAT teams to their homes. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

After a few weeks, 4chan banned Gamergate. Brennan seized the opportunity. “I looked at Gamergate very cynically,” he said. “I didn’t care about the ethics. And I didn’t care about the women ... I just cared that this is bringing users to my site.” bit.ly/2UxRn1K

It worked. And Brennan stepped into the persona of internet bad guy, lord of the trolls.

8chan was a truly free public forum, with no limits except what was illegal. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

Asked in an October 2014 interview if 8chan was a safe haven for nihilism and misogyny, Fredrick responded, “Imageboards are a haven for all of the terrible things you listed, and that's exactly what makes them such wonderful places. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

Fredrick says now, “You have to be a free speech absolutist if you want to be an 8chan admin because if you're anything else, you're gonna get burned at the stake.” bit.ly/2UxRn1K

Further establishing his free speech credentials, he wrote an essay advocating for eugenics for the premier neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. He said people with genetic diseases should be paid to be sterilized. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

“Here's how I see it,” Brennan said. “At the time, the whole world hated me. Who could blame them? I was technically not breaking any laws, but something about what I was doing felt wrong to almost everyone." bit.ly/2UxRn1K

"I feel like I wrote the article to say… Yes. you hate me and 8chan, but it's your shitty capitalist structure and milquetoast fear of genetic science that brought me here.” bit.ly/2UxRn1K

In 2014, Brennan sold 8chan to an American businessman in the Philippines, but he stayed on as a site administrator. He moved to Manila, where he could afford a home health aide. bit.ly/2UxRn1K

In April 2016, Brennan quit 8chan but kept working for the company that owned it. In December 2018, he quit that too. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

He’d started going to church with his aide, and met a woman there. He converted to Christianity, and they married on Valentine’s Day. Today, 8chan gets around 15 million unique visitors each month, according to Similarweb. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

Brennan began denouncing 8chan in March after a gunman killed 51 people in two New Zealand mosques after posting a white supremacist manifesto on 8chan. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

But when @elspethreeve spoke with him in Manila in May, he still wasn’t sure that if he knew then what he knows now, he wouldn’t have founded it. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

@elspethreeve When the El Paso shooting happened in early August, the third mass shooting this year in which the gunman shared his plans on 8chan, Fredrick began more explicitly calling for 8chan to disappear and never return. bit.ly/2UzVmuG

@elspethreeve They tried to post his address, and sent him images of him being pushed down the stairs. “I didn't create online harassment,” he said. “This has all been going on way before I came of age, but in a way, I kind of deserve it, don't you think?” bit.ly/2UzVmuG