# 8chan / 8kun An anonymous imageboard created in 2013 by Fredrick Brennan as a free-speech alternative to [[4chan]], later taken over by Jim Watkins and his son Ron Watkins. 8chan became the most extreme imageboard in the English-speaking world — a hub for mass shooting manifestos, [[QAnon]], and white nationalist organizing — before being deplatformed in 2019 and relaunching as 8kun. ## Origins: "Hotwheels" and the Free-Speech Absolutist Promise Fredrick Brennan, who goes by "Hotwheels" (he has osteogenesis imperfecta), created 8chan explicitly as a platform with fewer restrictions than 4chan, which had begun banning certain content. The pitch: absolute free speech, any board, any content, as long as it was legal. Brennan later became one of the site's most vocal critics, publicly calling for its shutdown and expressing regret for creating it. ## [[Gamergate]] Headquarters When 4chan banned Gamergate discussions in 2014, the campaign's organizers migrated en masse to 8chan, which became its de facto command center. This move established 8chan as the preferred platform for harassment campaigns and coordinated online mob actions that had been expelled from mainstream platforms. ## QAnon Migration and the Watkins Family After the initial QAnon drops on 4chan in 2017, "Q" moved posting to 8chan, where Jim and Ron Watkins controlled the site's administration — and thus controlled which accounts could post as "Q." Significant evidence points to Ron Watkins as having been "Q" himself, or at minimum having been able to impersonate Q at will. The HBO documentary series *Q: Into the Storm* (2021) builds this case in detail. When 8chan was deplatformed in 2019, QAnon moved with it to 8kun. ## Mass Shooting Manifestos 8chan became the platform of choice for mass shooters seeking to radicalize audiences and claim ideological credit: - **Christchurch mosque shootings (March 2019)** — [[Brenton Tarrant]] posted his manifesto and a link to his livestream on 8chan's /pol/ board moments before killing 51 people. The manifesto explicitly referenced accelerationist ideology. - **El Paso Walmart shooting (August 2019)** — Patrick Crusius posted a white nationalist manifesto on 8chan before killing 23 people, specifically targeting Hispanic people at a Walmart. - **Poway synagogue shooting (April 2019)** — John Earnest posted a manifesto on 8chan before killing 1 and injuring 3 at a synagogue. Three mass shootings in five months, all with 8chan manifestos, all in 2019. ## Deplatforming and Relaunch as 8kun Following the El Paso shooting, Cloudflare (DDoS protection) and its upstream provider Voxility dropped 8chan, taking it offline. Jim Watkins relaunched it as 8kun in November 2019, with QAnon boards intact. 8kun operates with significantly reduced infrastructure support and smaller reach than the original 8chan. ## Brennan's Reversal Fredrick Brennan, who created the site, became its most articulate critic. He has testified about the site's harms, called for its permanent shutdown, and sued Jim Watkins for defamation. His arc — idealistic free-speech absolutist to horrified regret — mirrors the broader failure of content-moderation nihilism as a policy. ## Connection to Defense Tech KB 8chan/8kun represents the most extreme end of the online radicalization pipeline that feeds the political movements mapped in this KB. The accelerationist ideology that spread through 8chan is the dark twin of [[Effective Accelerationism]] (e/acc) — where e/acc technologists accelerate capitalism and AI, accelerationists in the 8chan tradition accelerate civilizational collapse. Both trace philosophical roots to [[Nick Land]] and the broader [[Dark Enlightenment]].