After New Zealand Shooting,Hotwheels expresses Regrets,Tells Watkins to fuck off

Website known for behavior banned by mainstream platforms was chosen by mosque shooter to announce his deadly plan

Fredrick Brennan founded the website Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums’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 Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums until December.

While Zig Forums 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, Zig Forums 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, Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums had already posted a link to a copy of the video to a file-sharing site.

The behavior was typical of Zig Forums, 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.

wsj.com/articles/after-new-zealand-shooting-founder-of-Zig Forums-expresses-regrets-11553130001

To By pass paywall:

outline.com/8EN9Nb

cont. below

Attached: hotwheels watkins.jpg (3508x2480, 579.39K)

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 Zig Forums site known as Zig Forums. 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 Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums because they feared backlash from the site’s users.

That wasn’t the original vision for Zig Forums, according to Mr. Brennan. He created Zig Forums as an alternative to 4chan, which he felt was being too carefully controlled by its moderators. As an image board, Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums, Mr. Brennan said.

“I saw the GamerGate controversy as a way to expand Zig Forums,” 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, Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums’s administrator until 2016. Although at that point he ceased his involvement with Zig Forums, 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 Zig Forums 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 Zig Forums 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.

Hotwheels knows about all about Watkins and his alt-right cult members who live on a pig farm and are planning a global helter-skelter.

But he still has not been completely deprogrammed from his controller,Watkins, who has CIA training in mind control, so he cannot tell the complete truth.

Attached: jimbo mesmerises.gif (308x277, 888.66K)

sad

...

They can't help themselves in mentioning white supremacist content and child pornography in the same breath. I hate these kikes so goddamn much.

this is why we need to meme responsibly

Chaos Gods hate responsibility. Far too late for the genie to go back in the bottle.

so creator of this site hates all you fags? gotcha

Iirc Brennan says this article is bullshit and the quotes are fictitious.

Hotwheels couldn't make a decent font if Jesus himself was intervening.

This is not the first time this has been posted. I will say again: His interview where he was "Reconsidering his position on Free Speech" and regrets making Zig Forums was said at the exact same time he has been developing an uncensorable Peer-to-Peer imageboard. He only said these things to either 1) troll the media or 2) get the media hounds and pseudo-journalists off his back.

Source on the peer-to-peer project?

It’s too bad too. We could’ve used the little brittle fucker as something great but he decided to squander it. He could’ve been bigger than kuato irl

So what you're saying is, the deformed little mutant that dipshits thought was on their side is actually as much of a gross crippled cuckold as one would have assumed by looking at him?

I heard Wakins has used his CIA mind control techniques on Duterte.

Watkins now has brainwashed flip army soldiers at his beck to invade other nations and wreak havoc amongst blacks and/or Muslims and Jews .

The man is evil

Attached: jimbo duere.png (576x1024, 1.06M)

>>>Zig Forums1042296

you use that little mutants website be thankful

Attached: eee.jpg (647x740, 53.59K)

This bit made me laugh.
Whats the difference between the two? This reeks of jews saying shit like

Josh is a lot more evil so maybe Zig Forums would probably fare better with him at the helm, sadly he is also an incompetent retard manchild who hides behind his mom from trannies. Still it's an interesting thought

Nah. I can't wait til this shit heap crashes.

The site is controlled by hostile factions and the moderators are literal 4chan /int/niggers. This place has become little more than a containment board.

So much for the "Last Bastion of Free Speech". Gotta love how when the chips are down absolutely none of these faggots will ever stand up for anything, they just love to blow hot-air. Board last couple weeks has been unusable and the mods apparently don't even give a shit it's being shilled to death and all the Tarrant discussion slid because the mods are probably doing it themselves

SUNSHINE WAS IMPLEMENTED BY FRÉDÉRIC BRENNAN
HOTWHEELS IS A LITERAL KIKE HIS MOTHER IS JEWISH

ALL lolbergs are full of dogshit and will sell you to the ugliest tranny bulldyke bolshevik for a haypenny at the drop of a hat.


A website made with anons' code and paid for with anons' money.
(((YOU))) be grateful.

Attached: cripplekikeqlarp.png (2877x1345, 2.19M)

Gemini Got

this is the faggiest thing known to mankind, but i'd rather have imampfy as a mod than moon. Joshua Moon is the most arrogant and incompetent web programmer that crawled out of the earth. I can't believe infinity next was allowed on here.

Nice 21 "Aaron" "Schwartz"

Report away. Jim doesn't give a shit. He knows I love the Glass House. They have been good to me.

Excellent, a BlockChain Hybrid of a Image Board.
Hot Wheels succeeds in building this and then they can never shut us down. There’s so many nay sayers on Zig Forums that shows it is a Great Idea.

Attached: C17385CB-D271-4A13-9575-0AE5A82A7D4D.jpeg (736x736, 118.12K)

Fuck off. Kikewheels said that we need more censorship. Zig Forums is long destroyed. Zig Forums was taken over 3 years ago.

THEY DON'T NEED TO, FUCKFACE. ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS GET THEMSELVES IN MODERATOR POSITIONS.

didn't we already do this thread

Attached: Theo van Hoytema - ugly duckling.jpg (900x622 72.36 KB, 220.01K)

Not when the Hot Wheels invents the the New BlockChain Peer to Peer Uncensorable Image Board

>>>/gasyourself/

source on this