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.
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