Kiwifarms owner Josh Moon decided to step in a start his own free speech-themed imageboard as 8kun implodes under the weight of its administrators’ willingness to cop to censorship in the face of public scrutiny. However, Moon’s efforts were prematurely thwarted when the registrar for the domain decided to kneecap him by seizing the 9chan.us domain that he was going to use for the site. Their reason for doing so? They don’t believe in unfettered free speech without “adequate moderation”.
The tweets are now deleted but not before users archived them.
On April 22nd, 2020 the domain hosting company made the following tweet.
They were rightfully called out for their promotion of limited speech.
If you click on the link it leads back to a blog post that Epik published back on August 6th, 2019, explaining why they supported the deplatforming of 8chan due to a lack of moderation.
The relevant portion of the message reads…
“Epik actively supports lawful content, community, and commerce. As a matter of policy, management seeks to provide customers with solutions without bias or favoritism vis-à-vis race, religion, political affiliation, or sexual orientation. If a given content is legal, Epik endeavors to empower anyone to participate whether as producer or consumer. With the prevalence of user-generated content, including in fast-growing public forums, timely enforcement of Terms of Service can prove extremely difficult, notably in cases where a site has little in the way of revenue model with which to fund the services of professional moderators. In cases whereby Epik identifies a particular publisher as being under-equipped to properly enforce its own Terms of Service, Epik reserves the right to deny service.
Statement on decision to not provide BitMitigate service to 8Chan“Upon careful consideration of the recent operating history of 8Chan, and in the wake of tragic news in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend, Epik has elected to not provide content delivery services to 8Chan. This is largely due to the concern of inadequate enforcement and the elevated possibility of violent radicalization on the platform.”
Content creators like RagingGoldenEagle pointed out that once you support the limitations on speech beyond what’s protected by the Constitution, you invite totalitarianism.
This “I support free speech, but…” stance is an open invitation for totalitarianism. Add another domain registrar to the list of businesses you can’t trust to not just arbitrarily shut your stuff down and take the domain you paid for. https://t.co/1HE19w79jT
— RGE (Blade Devil live now on Indiegogo!) (@RageGoldenEagle) April 23, 2020
Other users pointed out that one of the reasons they dropped 9chan.us was because people jokingly sent them messages about “dolphin porn”.
Various users shamed them for not being defends of free speech at all. Content creator and Minnesota lawyer Nick Rekieta took them to task for the slogan in their Twitter bio that states they’re champions of “Responsible Free Speech”.
“responsible free speech” isn’t free speech at all.
— Rekieta Media (@RekietaMedia) April 23, 2020
Shortly after getting roasted by anyone who wasn’t a pro-censorship Leftist, Epik.com deleted their tweets defending censorship and limitations on free speech.
If you attempt to view the tweets in their exchange with Moon, you now get the following message.
Shortly thereafter Josh Moon had his Twitter account suspended. Before his account was suspended he did inform his followers that he was able to setup domain forwarding for 9chan.us after Epik.com finally released it.
However, if it wasn’t clear before that Epik doesn’t champion free speech, this little escapade should make it abundantly clear.
(Thanks for the news tip Guardian EvaUnit02)
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