“If 8chan is shutdown here is what will happen: someone else will spin up a new imageboard, say 20chan or whatever. People will flock to that,” Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab.ai, a social media refuge for people deplatformed by Twitter told BuzzFeed News. “Or someone will create an 8chan telegram channel. Or an 8chan Gab group. Or an 8chan Gab Social server hosted by someone else. Or they will go back to 4chan.”…

Deplatforming extremists can help, for instance, ISIS has been all but eliminated from social media. But it’s getting harder to do that.. All of this creates a vacuum that other decentralized apps are filling. Telegram, for instance, is a hotbed of radicalization at the moment. It’s used heavily by far-right street gang the Proud Boys and deplatformed far right influencers like Laura Loomer have personal channels with thousands of followers each. Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been kicked off every major social media site there is, runs a Telegram channel that has over 18,000 subscribers. Could these channels grow big enough and extreme enough to inspire the real world violence we’re seeing emerge from 8chan? It certainly seems plausible. Again, 8chan is anywhere. All it needs is an unmoderated space, and some angry like-minded people ruminating hateful, violent ideas.

On Sunday night, one of the top posts on 8chan was titled “Where to go when they shut 8ch down?” The original poster wrote, “Let’s be honest, at this pace, it’s just a matter of time. So any recommendations? Where do you plan to go when they close this shit? Any good forum, image board, site or whatever.”