Network Provider to Drop 8chan After El Paso Shooting

Internet services provider Cloudflare announced on Sunday that it planned to cease doing business with an online forum that a gunman apparently used before killing 20 people in El Paso, Texas, NBC News reported, citing a statement released by the company.

Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, wrote in a blog post that his company was dropping 8chan after gunmen in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Poway, California, also used the site.

The anonymous forum, which the Anti-Defamation League has tied to the rise of online extremism, had shown itself to be “lawless,” Prince said. "That lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.”

In El Paso, investigators are “reasonably confident” that suspect Patrick Crusius, 21, posted an anti-immigrant screed on the site shortly before the shooting. That note referenced the mass killing in Christchurch, when a white supremacist gunman allegedly gunned down 51 people and posted links to a livestream of the attack on 8chan.

Photo Credit: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

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