Immediately following this paragraph is a quote from a researcher:
> “If you’re a young man with no prospects hanging out on 4chan, you’re definitely on some Discords and probably some pretty dark Discords,” said Dale Beran, a lecturer at Morgan State University and the author of “It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.”
Researcher, perhaps, but seems to not be what his credentials or college role is about.
https://www.morgan.edu/screenwriting-and-animation/faculty-a...
CNN and reddit arguably did more than 4chan to get trump elected. They couldn't shut up about him and they have way more reach than 4chan.
It's beside the point, but does anybody actually see social studies and the like as "science" anymore when people in them get bullied and silenced and have their careers destroyed if they think or say the wrong thing? When things that go against left-wing beliefs don't get published? When an overwhelming majority of them are on the same political spectrum? After the grievance studies affair? I see it more as a propaganda machinery and after all if you tortute the data long enough, it will confess. I basically just ignore their research whenever I see this sort of stuff.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose." — James Baldwin.
And then, when the hotpot they ve been steering for a generation boils over, its all clutching pearls and "how could this happen".
Has the White House been grossly over-representing Ukraine's chances? Will Ukraine be unable to protect their airspace after late May?
At the very least it's not more anarchist leaning like it was 15 years ago.
Often it's political, and political messaging particularly about war is propaganda.
We don't have different words as to motives of those doing the leaking. A leak can be to support the status quo or hostile to it or anything else besides.
The New York Times has published, by my count, 15 articles on this leak in the past 7 days.
>But the unfiltered, edgy banter in the wow_mao server, which is called the End of Wow Mao Zone, and in many other servers like it, can sometimes veer into darker territory. Those servers are sometimes described as the less venomous cousins of 4chan, the far-right anonymous message board known for sharing conspiracy theories and popularizing QAnon. Many 4chan users split their time between Discord and 4chan, sharing digital memes and chatting with friends.
Emphasis added.
So... they fear NYT? Does this count as a publication threatening the government?
I know some newer versions of the IRC spec try to address at least some of these, but as far as I'm aware, they aren't very widely supported
The average person doesn't care about federation or an open protocol or whatever. They probably don't even understand those things and they don't want to understand them. They just want to chat with their friends and send emojis and not get upset that things don't work. IRC, by all accounts, fails to do—out of the box—all of those things (well).
https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1644139100407054336?cxt...
We have entered into a era where the difference between real and fake is almost impossible to distinguish. Deep fakes and LLM's are going to change propoganda forever.
Is it some kind of psych-op, LLM going on in the comments? No one's interested or curious about the documents and are spamming the page with 4chan shit?
4chan's Rule 3: "You will not post any of the following outside of /b/: Troll posts, Racism, Anthropomorphic ("furry") pornography, Grotesque ("guro") images..."
These rules are constantly being violated across many of the boards, and moderators rarely take action on some of the boards when posts are reported unless they explicitly violate US law. I've seen so many threads get to 400+ replies and fall off the boards, threads that blatantly violate these rules. The period of time after the 2020 election was brutal, an enormous amount of violent and racist content was not removed.
Rules are often even selectively enforced, sculpting narratives that moderator cliques decide on (see /pol/ for example).
At some point, it's worthwhile to ask "who benefits?" from these rules not being enforced. The kind of content that doesn't get moderated is strictly far-right stuff.
And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.
If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.
Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.
https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089253502461952...
However 4chan has always had, and continues to have quite broad demographics, it attracts extremes, by nature of it's low moderation and permissive content policies.
Some examples of left wing associated content could be it's very active LGBT user base.
It's involvement political movements like "anonymous", targeting groups like the Westboro baptist church, hacking the website of Uganda's anti-gay prime minister, occupy wall street, etc.
I can tell you for a fact that the large majority of the mods despise /pol/. As for rules not being enforced, if a post is not reported it likely won't be acted upon.
Now some people break down racism in some weird way where bigotry towards Africans or Hispanics is "right wing" and bigotry toward Caucasians and Asians is "left wing," but those people are laughable in their tribalistic thinking and weird politicization of everything.
For the admins, its a problem. Besides 8kun, they are pretty much the only major image board with anything really going for it, especially now that 420chan has bit the dust. However, if they enforce the rules, its very likely that people will either stop using it entirely or move on to 8kun instead. For the janitor problem, 4chan relies almost entirely on them to report posts that break the rules to the admins, but since its on a volunteer basis, janitors have no reason to take the role seriously which has led the site to be the gutter it is now.
Basically, the whole 4chan system is screwed. I used to go to 420chan as an alternative because it was way more "chill" and there was way less racism and trolling due to it having actual moderation. Now that its gone though my only choice for imageboards are 4chan and its much worse brother, 8kun so I have decided to stop using imageboards entirely until something decent gets started.
... now? It's felt like a cesspool for decades.
I mean, if giving the finger to pretty much everything is considered far-right, then what's considered far-left? Fundamentalism?
Even /sci/ has changed. You have race IQ intelligence threads all the time compared to 2011. Instead of the daily Putnam problem thread, you get that garbage.
NYT is pretty on the money here.
If this were 2010, I'd disagree with them, but not nowadays.
disclaimer of my own bias: I stopped using 4chan in 2012 because of how much of an alt right mess it became after /r9k/. Didn't have the words to describe it back then. I remember people making endless Dragon Age memes in the pinned thread in /v/ in response to the mass shooting by a particular Anders in 2011. They were celebrating it, and it was the most active live thread on the site in that moment.
Is race IQ intelligence discussion really "garbage"? To my knowledge there isn't strong evidence confirming or disproving the theory, but the science on the genetic component of intelligence is pretty solid, and it isn't implausible that certain ethnic groups have genes that confer more intelligence, similar to how certain ethnic groups have genes that make them taller or better runners (see for instance, the olympic winners for sprints).
If anything, they are good evidence for horseshoe theory, or perhaps invalidity of the left-right scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
4chan. The most notorious boards feel anarchist and were very anti-globalist long before it was fashionable.
But as you implied, 4chan as a whole is not homogenous.
They mostly keep the communism will win white genocide now stuff behind the paywall though.
Everyone has their uncle or cousin that says "I am not racist I just hate everyone equally"...
It's also a GOP playbook to destroy or disrupt social services and education to then say "look how bad everything is"...
