the new hbo qanon doc is good in some ways, but frustrating in others. chiefly that the director @cullenhoback gives jim watkins cover by downplaying his links to child pornography domains and misleads his viewers about my and @ajvicens reporting to do it. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/04/hbo-qanon-into-the-storm-ron-watkins/

our reporting found that at a minimum jim watkins (8chan/8kun owner) profited from domains with pedophilic names, including some that also ref sexual assault. we also found that jim might have been hosting sites with actual child porn on them https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/jim-watkins-child-pornography-domains/

in the last episode, cullen mentions our oct. investigation into the child porn-themed domains jim hosted. instead of exploring this, cullen dismisses it as a gross-but-not-illegal nothingburger by gullible reporters who took bait that “mainstream outlets” passed on

then cullen misleads his viewers, saying that we only found one child porn domain under jim’s purview, which was one of the more innocuous (but obviously still gross) domains. we found *scores of domains.* as in multiples of 20. here’s a look at what jim hosted:

cullen also claims that the website was 20 or so years old and deleted a while back. some other websites, that he ignored, might have been still active as recently as october. in some cases jim wasn’t just hosting the child porn themed domains, he was listed as an admin on them

in our reporting, we didn’t find evidence of outlets passing on the story because of this and we are a news outlet that does our own legitimate reporting. this story was vetted by two editors, separately fact-checked and many of our findings were reviewed by independent experts