Fredrick Brennan founded the website 8chan 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.
Brennan, a former Brooklynite who cut ties with the site in December, said he believed 8chan’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 8chan praising Tarrant’s actions, have persuaded 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.”
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.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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