Fredrick Brennan founded the website 8chan more than five years ago as a no-holds-barred bastion of unconstrained speech devoted to critiquing what he saw as the authoritarianism of leftist culture and politics.
Now, he says, it has gone too far.
Mr. Brennan, a former Brooklynite who cut ties with the site in December, said he believed 8chan’s administrators were too slow to remove the post last week from Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter Brenton Tarrant and posts on the site’s message boards that incite violence. Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Mr. Tarrant’s actions, have persuaded Mr. Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting.
“It was very difficult in the days that followed to know that I had created that site,” he said in an interview from the Philippines, where he has lived since 2014. He added: “It wouldn’t surprise me if this happens again.”
Mr. Brennan for years tended to one of the internet’s darkest corners, moderating the site as criticism mounted for its persistently racist content and tolerance for user behavior that was long ago banned by mainstream platforms. The site has also been criticized for users posting child pornography and coordinating aggressive harassment campaigns against critics. Mr. Brennan was an administrator on the site until 2016 and worked for the owners of 8chan until December.
While 8chan is available on the open internet, it is often blocked by corporate firewalls and is no longer indexed by Google’s search engine.
Mr. Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. “I didn’t spend enough time making friends in real life,” he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn’t matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man.
“I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff,” he said.
On its Twitter page, 8chan said that it was refraining from comment on the Christchurch shooting to avoid disrupting the police investigation. The site’s administrators didn’t respond to requests for comment. The website’s operators say on the site that they don’t allow content that is illegal in the U.S.
Like 4chan, another popular message board that came before it, 8chan is known as an image board, in which users can post text but discussions tend to be driven by images. Because its users can remain anonymous—and aren’t required to go by their real names, as on a site like Facebook—it is impossible to say exactly how many people visit the site. Mr. Brennan estimates about 100,000 people regularly do so.
Just before he embarked on the shooting rampage that left 50 dead in Christchurch, Mr. Tarrant chose 8chan as the outlet for announcing his intentions.
“I have provided links to my writings below,” he allegedly wrote to the readers of the site, “please do your part by spreading my message, making memes and shitposting as you usually do.”
In the days since that post, the anonymous 8chan users have done that: They have posted hundreds of messages, digitally altered photographs and videos of the shooting, designed to become viral “memes” that will quickly spread around the internet. On Tuesday, Facebook said that before it was alerted to Mr. Tarrant’s live stream of the shooting, a user on 8chan had already posted a link to a copy of the video to a file-sharing site.
The behavior was typical of 8chan, which researchers say has become a breeding ground for the radicalization of white nationalists, and whose mostly volunteer-based content moderators are often quick to delete posts that differ from its far right-wing views.
The site embodies “a kind of culture of extremity which can be pinned to extreme humor, extreme offensiveness, extreme speech,” said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at McGill University who studies online culture. What started as a critique of leftist culture, has gradually evolved into a “watering hole for very right reactionary fascist politics,” she said.
Many of the images are racist or otherwise offensive, and often represent in-jokes designed to be understood by the readers of a subsection of the 8chan site known as /pol/. This discussion board bills itself as a “politically incorrect” forum, but in recent days it has emerged as both a cheering squad for Mr. Tarrant and a hotbed of conspiracy theories, suggesting that the shooting might have been a “false flag” operation designed to cause a backlash against white nationalists.
Like Mr. Tarrant’s manifesto, the 8chan posts and memes are largely designed to sow division, researchers say.
The site’s users have also become known for attacking and sometimes doxing—a term for posting the private information of people online without their consent—its critics. Some researchers contacted for this article said they wouldn’t comment on the record about 8chan because they feared backlash from the site’s users.
That wasn’t the original vision for 8chan, according to Mr. Brennan. He created 8chan as an alternative to 4chan, which he felt was being too carefully controlled by its moderators. As an image board, 8chan was designed so that users could anonymously post images then comment on them, a combination that made it the ideal nursery for internet memes.
Initially Mr. Brennan envisioned 8chan as a kind of amalgamation of the online communities built at Reddit and 4chan. In 2014, when 4chan moderators began removing threads relating to GamerGate—a grass-roots reaction against the perceived influence of liberal politics in the videogame industry that was widely seen as bullying and misogynistic—many of 4chan users fled to 8chan, Mr. Brennan said.
“I saw the GamerGate controversy as a way to expand 8chan,” he said. “I wanted to unseat 4chan and to me it didn’t matter how it happened.”
But with its toxic brand of racism and offensive material, 8chan was a money loser, with revenues of no more than about $100 a month (through some advertising and donations) because advertisers generally didn’t want any connection to it. He said the site was attracting white nationalists from the start, but that the overall tenor of the message board sites changed noticeably leading up to the 2016 presidential election. “It went more from libertarian to national socialism,” he said.
In January 2015, Mr. Brennan ceded control of the website to an internet entrepreneur named Jim Watkins, who hosted 2channel, an older site that was similar to 8chan and was popular in Japan but also controversial for its sexual content and hate speech.
Mr. Brennan, who suffers from a painful medical condition called osteogenesis imperfecta that requires he use a wheelchair, moved to the Philippines to work for Mr. Watkins in October 2014. There he stayed on as 8chan’s administrator until 2016. Although at that point he ceased his involvement with 8chan, he continued to work for Mr. Watkins as a software developer until December, Mr. Brennan said.
Mr. Brennan describes himself as a lapsed libertarian with no fixed ideology. But he believes that there is no way to stop the toxic speech that has come to define the site without committing to more aggressive moderation, saying it needs “to be totally redesigned and re-engineered with more censorship in mind.”
Mr. Brennan says he places some of the responsibility for the way 8chan was used to publicize the attack with Mr. Watkins and the current administrators, who he blames for being slow to remove Mr. Tarrant’s alleged posts and other posts on the message boards that are inciting violence. Nevertheless, he said, he was saddened to see the tragedy in New Zealand associated with something he created.
Mr. Watkins didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Mr. Brennan said he was disturbed by the possibility that attention being heaped on Mr. Tarrant on 8chan could lead another young man to commit a similar act.
But that is unlikely to happen on a website administered by Mr. Brennan. He is now doing freelance programming work and doesn’t plan ever to be involved again in the image-board world. He began posting 4chan when he was 12 years old, meaning he has now been involved in image boards for more than half of his life.
“I have no desire to ever be involved in the image-board world again,” he said. “A lot of these sites cause more misery than anything else.”
Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications The photo in this article is credited to Fredrick Brennan. An earlier version of this article misspelled his first name as Frederick. (March 20, 2019)
