The leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee are demanding the owner of the online message board 8chan come before lawmakers following a wave of shootings in which the suspected gunmen posted extremist and racist screeds on the site.
In a letter Tuesday, Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and ranking member Mike Rogers, R-Ala., requested 8chan owner Jim Watkins’ presence before the panel to discuss how he is addressing the spread of extremist content on the platform.
“Experts have described 8chan as a platform for amplifying extremist views, leading to the radicalization of its users,” Thompson and Rogers wrote. “Americans deserve to know what, if anything, you, as the owner and operator, are doing to address the proliferation of extremist content on 8chan.”
The request comes in the wake of Saturday’s shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where 22 people were killed and two dozen were injured. Police believe the suspected gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto in which he said the attack was a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The screed was posted to 8chan minutes before the rampage began.
Thompson and Rogers said the manifesto is “at least the third act of white supremacist violence linked” to 8chan this year. In April, a gunman who opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one and wounding three, posted an anti-Semitic letter on the site before the shooting, and in March, the attacker who killed 51 and injured 49 at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, uploaded a 74-page manifesto to 8chan.
Following the massacre in El Paso, Cloudflare, 8chan’s network service provider, said it is ending its services for 8chan. The online message board’s founder Fredrick Brennan, who started the site in 2013, also said the site is “not doing the world any good” and called for it to be shuttered.
But Watkins defended the platform in a YouTube video posted Tuesday. The company, he said, began immediately working with the FBI following the shooting in El Paso and a second shooting Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, and has always cooperated with law enforcement.
“We have never protected illegal speech, as it seems that we have been accused of by some less-than-credible journalists,” Watkins said in the 7-minute-long video. “We have responded with both vigor and integrity every single time a threat of violence has been posted.”
He also lambasted Cloudflare’s decision to terminate its relationship with 8chan, calling it “cowardly.”
The spate of shootings has ramped up the pressure on internet companies to combat the spread of racist and hateful content. Prominent social media companies have taken steps to identify and remove hateful content, but less-recognized sites such as 8chan, which started as a haven for free speech, have become known for fostering racism and extremist violence.
Facebook, for example, uses artificial intelligence to root out harmful content and employs 15,000 people around the world who review posts. Twitter has also purged hundreds of thousands of accounts for spreading terrorism-related content and introduced new policies in 2017 to crack down on hate speech and violence.
