Brennan created the website after observing what he perceived to be rapidly escalating surveillance and a loss of free speech on the Internet. HistoryĨchan was created in October 2013 by computer programmer Fredrick Brennan. After several attempts to return to clearnet were ultimately stymied by providers denying service to 8chan, the site returned to the clearnet as 8kun in November 2019 through a Russian hosting provider. Voxility, a web services company that had been renting servers to Epik, the site's new domain registrar, as well as Epik's CDN provider subsidiary BitMitigate, also terminated service.

In the aftermath of the back-to-back mass shootings on August 3 in El Paso and August 4 in Dayton, Ohio, respectively, the site was taken off clearnet on August 5, 2019, when network infrastructure provider Cloudflare stopped providing their content delivery network (CDN) service. Shortly before the 2019 El Paso shooting, a four-page message justifying the attack was posted to the site, and police have stated that they are 'reasonably confident' it was posted by the perpetrator. 8chan is the home of the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory. Several of the site's boards played an active role in the Gamergate harassment campaign, encouraging Gamergate affiliates to frequent 8chan after 4chan banned the topic. The site has been known to host child pornography as a result, it was filtered out from Google Search in 2015.

The site has been linked to white supremacism, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, racism and antisemitism, hate crimes, and multiple mass shootings. An owner moderates each board, with minimal interaction from site administration. 8kun, previously called 8chan, Infinitechan or Infinitychan (stylized as ∞chan), is an imageboard website composed of user-created message boards.

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