I've been on imageboards since 2009. Since then, I've seen a disturbing, consistent, and reoccurring phenomenon which involves board admins and CP distributors. CP spam has been a constant in imageboard history, but it's usually regarded as a natural consequence of running a public board with very little screening ability. That's what I thought when I first came across it on 4chan. I don't believe that anymore, at least not for most boards.
So, getting to the meat of it: most board admins and jannies actively facilitate the CP spam they get. They aren't just complacent, they are actually financially involved with the people posting it.
>board owners are in a conspiracy to get their own boards shut down
No for the board shutdown part, yes for the conspiracy part. I first saw this on /b/ back in 2010, where there was regular CP spam all revolving around the same ring of websites. The spam would be posted at exactly 2AM eastern time, and it wouldn't be removed until at least 8 hours later. Sometimes users would be courteous enough to let the CP threads drift down the pages until it was deleted, but most of the time they would end up getting bumped back to the first page over and over again.
4chan never shut down because of this kind of thing. In fact, very few imageboards have ever shut down because of CP. Obviously the ones made exclusively for it get yanked, but repeated and even hardcore CP spam on imageboards that are supposedly meant for other topics stays under the radar. I truly believed this was an unavoidable problem that the jannies were too slow to prevent all the time, but I didn't think much of it other than to bitch until the shit was removed. The thing is, the jannies were deliberately not doing their jobs.
The post that changed my mind on all of this was on 8chan's /b/ shortly after the site went up. The thread included IRC logs from people who were supposedly 4chan mods talking to another user about accepting payment for delaying action against CP spam. I would have disregarded this, but it actually included Bitcoin transaction hashes that showed the transfers on the same dates shown in the chatlogs. It implicated staff from several imageboards, including 4chan and 420chan, as well as several 8chan BOs. A lot of saged posters came out of the woodwork to call the post fake and gay. It gave off the stench of a cointelpro style campaign against it. Knowing 8chan's audience, none of them bothered calling it a "conspiracy theory" but you can bet your ass they wanted to use that thought stopper.
I'm not saying that boards are being paid off by feds to host CP. In fact, I actually believe this is purely private and nongovernmental. These CP websites are businesses after all, just really fucked up evil ones, usually run by southeast asians. The best explanation I can offer for WHY they're using imageboards is that they are used to dealing with spam and know how to play it off and avoid responsibility. The imageboards aren't reliable distribution networks, but they ARE resilient hubs for discovering the sites that actually host the paid CP and groups. And when one of the CP sites is taken down, the new one can be posted on an imageboard that won't be taken down. It's very similar to how a command and control server works for malware.
The patterns here are extremely common, and I've started to recognize the rings of sites that are posted on compromised imageboards. I will offer a caveat that the site owner usually isn't complicit with this or being paid off, but at least one of the jannies is actively receiving money from CP site operators through cryptocurrency and allowing the site to be used as a sort of CP C&C server or discovery hub. With enough sites as C&C, these sites have reliable redistribution methods when their sites are taken down, sites that cannot be held legally liable for the CP spam and links.
If you are a board or site owner, please audit your jannies and interrogate them about the CP spam. If you're seeing regular CP spam all of a sudden and jannies are too slow, there's a very high chance that one or more of them are compromised.
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