Anonymous ID: 0340db May 14, 2019, 12:54 a.m. No.6494313   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>4320 >>4328 >>4334

EXCLUSIVE: How money flows from Amazon to 8chan

Follow the money from the world's most valuable company to a racist troll haven

21 hr Public post 26

You may or may not know about the 8chan websiteโ€”but you are familiar with its work. The rudimentary message board is a wellspring of racism, violence, and criminal activity online and in the physical world.

 

Most famously, 8chan hosted a manifesto from the Christchurch shooter who killed 50 people at mosques in New Zealand. After the massacre, 8chan users flooded the website with posts praising the mass murder. Before killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the shooter posted threatening messages on 8chan.

 

8chan differs from other hate sites in that it has a relatively stable presence online. The white supremacist site The Daily Stormer, by contrast, struggles to find domain hosts and raise funds to pay for bandwidth.

 

What's 8chan's secret? It can all be traced back to its owner, Jim Watkins and his company, NT Technologies. Watkins has created a mostly self-contained system where he hosts the 8chan domain without the help of third parties. And itโ€™s allowed 8chan to remain on solid footing while its contemporaries struggle. While Watkins couldn't stop Google from delisting 8chan from its search results, people who wanted to find it still knew where to go.

 

But Watkins still needs an outside source of cash to pay for the servers, bandwidth, and staff that keep 8chan running. A significant source of the site's funding is Amazon.

 

The origins of 8chan

8chan was founded by Fredrick Brennan, a software developer from New York, who came up with the idea while high on mushrooms.

 

Brennan, who goes by the moniker "Hotwheels" online, initially tried to finance the site through the crowdfunding site Patreon. But he was quickly booted from the platform. After that, 8chan frequently went offline for exceeding its allotted bandwidth or violating the rules of Internet Service Providers, which typically ban hate speech.

 

That's when Jim Watkins, an Army veteran in his 50s who runs a pig farm in the Philippines, reached out. Brennan moved to the Philippines afterwards, and 8chan became the property of Watkins' company, NT Technologies.

 

Brennan, according to the Wall Street Journal, "cut ties with the site in December" and said, "8chanโ€™s administrators were too slow to remove the post" from the New Zealand shooter.

 

How Watkins runs 8chan

Watkins circumvents the difficulty of hosting a toxic site like 8chan by handling it himself through a company he owns: NT Technologies.

 

Watkins also hosts dozens of related sites through NTTEC.com, which can be traced through a search on the website "Security Trails."

 

Perhaps the most important of these sites is "books.audio," a site owned by TGW Enterprise Inc, which is Watkins' company. Among the sites in the Watkins empire, books.audio is one of the few sells anything, providing him with a source of cash.

 

Books.audio sells audiobooks, including books narrated by Watkins. And Watkins uses 8chan and other sites that he hosts to run ads promoting audiobooks from the books.audio website. This is clearest on The Goldwater, a news site established by Watkins and hosted by NTTEC.com.

 

The Goldwater is a news site that caters to the 8chan audience, as BuzzFeed explained.

 

The siteโ€™s videos star attractive Filipina women who deliver pro-Trump news in heavily accented English. And at a time when most news sites obsess over generating traffic from Facebook, The Goldwater largely ignores that platform. Instead, everything it does is catered to the trolls, alt-righters, Trump sh*tposters, and other anonymous members of the internetโ€™s most deplorable message board, 8chan.

 

Yes, The Goldwater wants to be the pre-eminent news source for internet trolls.

 

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