This is the third "mass casualty event" in less than a year that was immediately followed up by censorship of the internet...

Last year, after the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the new social-media platform Gab was attacked in the press and bullied off the internet.

Earlier this year, following the Christ Church mosque attack, New Zealand briefly totally blocked access to several websites.

Yesterday, two men allegedly killed 30 people at a store in Dayton Ohio, and a mall in El Paso Texas.

Today 8chan has been totally shut down.

If you don't know what 8chan is, well it's like 4chan but without the sense of decency. If you don't know what 4chan is, it's like reddit went off its medication.

Both places could be, can be, kinda gross. But they could – can – also be amazing. Insightful. Useful. Free speech is like that. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly. If you cut off the ugly parts it's not "free speech" anymore. This is something we all know, but the media is trying to force us to forget.

The boot-licking justification of this move was, of course, spear-headed by The Guardian: 8chan: the far-right website linked to the rise in hate crimes

The hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers in the media are happy to pretend this is about "hate" and "safety", which is obviously not true.

Take the thrust of the Guardian article:

8chan...why is a website linked to such a high death count allowed to exist on the open internet?