After New Zealand Shooting,Hotwheels expresses Regrets, quits 8ch

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.

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

To By pass paywall:
outline.com/8EN9Nb

cont. below

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Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
retroshare.cc/
supersimpleserver.com
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

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 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.

Zig Forums incites no more hatred than Reddit or any other user-created discussion board

Article states he quit 8ch in 2016
He quit Watkins in Dec 2018

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.

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What Zig Forums should do is simply make a very clear guideline for users telling them what is and is not acceptable, and making it very clear where the LEGAL boundaries are. Make it clear what is criminal / banned by law and give examples within some new warning page for the user base. That way average anons can still enjoy free speech, but we know what what is or is not acceptable according to current laws. I think that is part of the problem here: many anons (such as myself) are actually very ignorant when it comes to speech laws, therefore its very easy for one of us to slip up, and say something that could be construed as hate speech or a threat or whatever the law deems to be illegal. Ignorant (read: average) users need some kind of warning to let them KNOW what is not allowed or what is crossing legal boundaries.

Geeze, this guy is confined to a wheel chair and he still matures enough to get away from this adolesant crap
what's the excuse for aging anons ver on Zig Forums?

Naw, you wuz only hyperbolatin' bout aѕѕαsƽᎥnation

Thats part of the problem, how do we KNOW for sure what is or is not against the law when it comes to satire, jokes, or even suggestion? What about talks of civil war, where does that draw the line if its hypothetical yet extreme speech. I've heard people many times say "gas the kikes", "day of the rope", "if they come for the guns, hand them the lead"…. OK, so is that going too far? What about joking about the murder or even potential murder of someone? Does that draw the line? The problem is most people don't know what the law is or not, or have their own speculations that may not be accurate. And thus, we have extremism forming because people keep pushing the button till they don't know what is or is not acceptable.

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

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Never specify a person or organization or bulding as the one that should be hurt

no politicians name
don't say the twin towers need to be blown up
don't say the The NAACP or the Democratic party or it's it's members should be killed

Saying that they should be lined up against a wall and shot has acceptable political overtones and is probably ok

Saying BLM or neo-nazis members need to be shot is ok, as long as one doesn't name or hint at a specific person

It's getting specific that draws attention, for it appears taht you are seriously trying to encourage violence against members of a group with a few members

Saying politicians in Yuma who are pro catch and release of illegals need to be aѕѕαsƽᎥnation ed is likely to dra attention.

Even using should may be going to far in the present political environment

The attached pix maybe too sensitive now, even though it was posted numerous times before

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Thank you for the heads up. And despite Johnny Neptune and the others claiming I made some death threat, all I said was "politicians guilty of treason should be [you know what]" and that was meant to be a joke, posted in a thread filled with hyperbole and satire. It still got reported and now everyone is telling me I'm on the Ironclad terrorist list being monitored 24/7!

This is first time this has been posted about his brak with Watkins, but Brennan has stated before about his break with 8ch in 2016
But In an 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.

Peer to peer imageboard

>>>Zig Forums1042296

Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views.[1][2][3] The original statement, by Nathan Poe, read:[1]

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

disappointing stuff as usual

what exactly someone in Brennans position really has to fear is a wonder to me, maybe he's dead and someone else is writing all this.

He's basically a lower profile Assange, was it all a lie from the beginning or is he dead and some sick weirdo thinks doing all this shit is a good idea ? Nice choice of hat too, maybe there's no ass Steve won't plough.

Can a Twit tell us what the latest is with this crip?
I no can do Twatter.

I heard Hotwheels was the REAL Mark Wiering.

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I heard (sac) was Hotwheels and he likes to fuck with the likes of boomers 3 who shit up his boards

Think of Johnny adding his art collection to an art museum and some jackass comes along and takes his art, dumps it all in the garbage outback, and takes some paint and splatters it recklessly on the walls where his original art was. Then having the nerve to tell Johnny "what you painted was not art, this is!" That about sums the who fucking thing up right there.

This is like that tv show with TED Danson The Good Place that i read was good, but i have too many tv shows to watch so I put it on the to do list

I am a demon like TED and my goal in life is to make 'killcen/ suffer by occasionally bumping and praising and then shitting and sliding his threads

I am in hell also, so I want others to suffer like me

It's so easy to escape

There's the door

Walk out it and say hello(heavenhi) to a real live person

Free speech means nothing is barred regarding speech tyrone.

I think it would be funny if you got your door kicked in a 2 am and sombody let your mom choose if she wanted to suck you off or instead get fucked by her son at gunpoint. Is that acceptable?

Can this (sac) feller stop treating us like we're all retards and just tell us what (sac) means? I mean, to him? Vecause it means nothing to us. If you're talking about the leddit mexican meaning that would be weird because it just doesn't fit for so many reasons. Do you have a lot of Mexicans in the UK? Do you just like throwing around terminology to make yourself seem more educated about stupid shit than the rest of us more 'common' folk? I guess what I'm getting at is that absolutely no one on this site knows what (sac) means, including you.
Prove me wrong.

I second this sentiment.
What does (sac) mean?

what could it meme,(sac)I wonder?

Well this is my news board (sac). I hope you are not the one sliding my threads, maybe that was someone else, I don't know. But someone obviously does and all I can do is bump mine back and out of vengeance I'll post links to the reports I posted.

You don't bother me, I don't mind you here. But I do wonder who is sliding my threads. It typically happens around 5PM to 6PM.dinner time

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hindsight is always 20/20 but, damn.

Eat shit and die censorship-loving faggot kike.

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The semi-real surreal real Young Dhr Wiering

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It already exists. It's called millchan on zeronet.

Retroshare also has decentralized image boards as well. And with software such as Super Simple Server you can also host your own p2p sites (although I don't know if others can interact with them or not but you can look into it).

retroshare.cc/
supersimpleserver.com

hotwheels hasnt been involved in years.