Essential California Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Tuesday, Aug. 6, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. Want to make Essential California better? Please take this reader survey. In his much-cited 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow — an internet pioneer and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — wrote that “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” But the utopian ideals of the early internet are increasingly at odds with the view of it as a place for free speech at all costs, as the darker corners of the web have proved a fertile breeding ground for violent extremism. The accused El Paso shooter has been tentatively linked by authoritiesto a hate-filled manifesto posted on an online forum called 8chan shortly before the shooting. The El Paso massacre brought a flood of attention to the anarchic site, but this isn’t the first time an active shooter has been linked to 8chan. The suspected gunmen who opened fire in a Poway, Calif., synagogue and Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques also allegedly posted writings to 8chan. Cloudflare, a San Francisco tech company, announced late Sunday that it would no longer act as 8chan’s content distribution network and cybersecurity provider. “The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” Cloudflare’s chief executive wrote in a blog post. “Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.” 8chan went dark on Monday and then “flickered back online in some regions” before going dark again, as the site struggled to migrate between service providers. What is 8chan? A quick primer: 8chan is a site that hosts user-generated message boards where anyone can post graphic or extremist content anonymously. It bills itself as being “the darkest reaches of the internet,” and that description is hauntingly accurate. The Associated Press reports that “violent U.S. extremists have used it to share tips and encourage one another.” 8chan was founded in 2013 by a computer programmer named Fredrick Brennan as a less-regulated alternative to 4chan, another toxic corner of the internet where hate speech is prevalent. Brennan gave up control of the site in 2015 and has since called for it be shut down. Brennan has also characterized the site as a haven for “domestic terrorists.” The future of 8chan underscores a much larger debate, and one that is likely to play out with renewed fervor after the El Paso shooting: the question of what responsibility tech companies — many of which are based in California — hold in combating the spread of extremism, particularly as it turns violent. It’s far too soon to speculate on how the weekend’s tragic events may or may not alter the debate, but we will probably continue to see these questions play out on the international stage in the weeks and months to come.