Shut Down Mass-Murder Site 8chan-by Pressuring Amazon
Now that we’ve entered an age of “performative mass murder,” perhaps it would behoove us to start unpacking 1) where these sick fucks come from 2) how these platforms function and 3) how do they sustain themselves?
Because they’re just getting warmed up.
The Christchurch killer explicitly tailored his murders to perform for his adoring “fans” online.
The atrocity in Christchurch was explicitly designed to exploit the daily diet of search-engine-optimised content that feeds our viral media culture – a hamster’s wheel powered by fury which spins ever faster, destined for nowhere. The slaughter, broadcast live on Facebook, was supplemented with a ghoulish white supremacist manifesto that had been uploaded to social media channels in the knowledge it would spread like a cancer.
It did. Of course it did. Why should performative mass murder be any different to unboxing or ASMR videos? In the clickable, sharable realm, it was planned as a content package. “Terrorism is theatre,” Brian Jenkins famously declared back in 1974. Nowadays, the acts are subdivided by pop-up ads.
Here’s how 8Chan milks Amazon for the money it needs to survive:
The books.audio audiobooks are sold through Amazon.com for a fee of between $3 and $17. They are also free if you sign up for an Audible.com subscription. If someone buys a books.audio audiobook through Amazon, books.audio gets a cut of 40 percent of the retail price. If the audiobook is downloaded by an Audible.com subscriber (who pays $15 per month for an all-you-can listen account), books.audio collects about 20 percent of the retail price. If someone subscribes to Audible.com and listens to a books.audio book as his or her first audiobook and then stays a subscriber for two months, books.audio gets a $75 new customer bonus.
As a result, Amazon is likely a significant source of funding for 8chan. The website features a few advertisements from other sources.
Watkins selection of Amazon as his financial lifeline to the outside world is not an accident. The company does not run away from websites that others deem toxic. When thousands of advertisers abandoned Breitbart after the right-wing website featured racist categories like “black crime,” Amazon continued to run ads on the site.