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8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now
- username3 7y agoThey should monitor 8chan for manifestos and get alerts for PDF attachments. > It was originally posted on 4chan, later to 8chan. > In each instance, community members denounced the man’s intentions and informed LEO.
- bowmessage 7y agoThey do, see the 8chan affadivit in which multiple post screencaps from LEO have ‘(You)’ attached.
- tus88 7y agoYou think they don't? It's well known 4chan allowed the fbi to scan their servers for child abuse material.
- deft 7y agothe fbi literally pays people to post in threads about mass shooters.
- bowmessage 7y agoCitation needed?
- notamy 7y agoI can't speak to the accuracy of this, but a quick Google search suggested [0] which linked to [1], which says: > What is notable is that next to the “Anonymous” user label on some of the posts is a “(You)” marking: > As it turns out, this text is to let the user know that they are looking at their own posts! This means that Special Agent Rod inadvertently exposed himself as 8chan user ID “8f4812” by including these screenshots as his supporting exhibit. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/c1nnsn/fbi_agent_accidentally_reveals_own_8chan_posts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/c1nnsn/fbi_... [1] https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/ https://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/fbi-8chan/
- fuddcoinn 7y agonotamy's referenced links are the best original sources, when followed through. they were documents submitted by the FBI to the court and admitted and thus are available to the public as documented evidence. yes the FBI outed itself accidentally.
- faissaloo 7y agoFyi this is wrong, it was initially posted to 8chan. Idk where they got the idea it was originally posted to 4chan.
- Causality1 7y agoOne feels compelled to point out that, despite 8chan being a breeding ground of hate, threads by mass shooters are typically removed in minutes and threats or manifestos containing identifying information are forwarded to the authorities, with at least one known incident being prevented by them, a planned shooting at Bethel Park High School. Which, frankly, is the surprising part since I don't know why any sane person would set foot there. I visited once a few weeks after its founding and it had already degenerated to the point most regular users probably deserve to be on some kind of government list. Going there is just asking for trouble and I would urge anyone curious to look for screenshots instead of actually visiting the website.
- m0ck 7y agoYou need to make a distinction between 8chan as a website and /pol/ board. Imageboards are just places for unmoderated and free discussions, the topics are up to users (especially on 8chan, where they can even create their own boards, which is not possible on 4chan). Most of the discussions there are innocent in nature, it's always the same few boards which create shit like this.
- kevingadd 7y agoYeah, and part of the problem is that policy allows the bad boards to stick around so they multiply. In practice the bad policy means it doesn't matter how many good boards there are because there's a board next door hosting child porn or something.
- m0ck 7y agoThis is a way more complicated topic than it sounds. If there was a board dedicated to planning and carrying out mass shootings, or other violent acts, I'm sure it would get deleted rather quickly. But when the topic of a board is "discussion of politics", it isn't illegal in nature. It's the same reason why Reddit administrators hasn't deleted /r/the_donald yet, despite many of it's users breaking Reddit rules. It's hard to draw the line where it's acceptable to ban a whole community with "safe topic", because majority of posters are breaking the rules / law.
- puranjay 7y agoWhat's even stranger to me is how "normal" mass shootings have become
- wyldfire 7y agoApparently this marks US Mass shooting #250 for 2019 (this was the 215th day of the year). [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/03/el-paso-walmart-shooting-250th-mass-shooting-this-year/1913486001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/03/el-pas...
- javagram 7y agoWorth considering the varying definitions of mass shooting can inflate the count beyond what people may think of when they read “mass shooting”. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/12/03/obamas-inconsistent-claim-on-the-frequency-of-mass-shootings-in-the-u-s-compared-to-other-countries/?utm_term=.60ada5099c1b https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/12/... The US is a large company and there are more guns than people. There’s a lot of opportunity for people to snap and go on a rampage, unfortunately.
- wyldfire 7y agoEven if they consider "3" to be "mass" it's a bit alarming.
- darawk 7y agoThe problem though is that numbers aren't really the salient characteristic here. If some gang kills 5 members of another gang, that's not really a "mass killing" in the sense that this El Paso thing was.
- Barrin92 7y agoNot ideologically, but very much in the sense that the state has lost control of ensuring the safety of its citizens, which is what it boils down to at the end of the day. There are very straight-forward steps to be taken to reduce both gang violence and the fanatic mass shootings, and they're not being pursued.
- kartan 7y agoThere was a time that it was difficult for me to understand how it was possible that governments in the middle east were supporting domestic terrorism. It was difficult to imagine how normal people were supporting the killing of fellow citizens. Now, that I see this same trend unravel in the USA it becomes easier to understand. I have seen for the past decades the shifting of what "conservative" means. Extremists were always there, that I knew. But, it has been scary to see how moving what normality is toward the extreme has happened. News, in USA case Fox News, have validated the extremist's views creating an equivalence between "both sides". In Europe there are similar movements, but, it has not been televised so much. Except, maybe, for the rise of extremism in the United Kingdom. As interesting it is from the political perspective, it is dishearting the amount of suffering that it is causing. The political discourse is not used to agree in a way forward for society but as a battleground. And, again, news outlets share its part of fault. Diminishing investment in education probably is even more to blame. The response is not to be angry, but to be calm and help society to value well-intended discussions over sensationalist posts and news headers. I hope that it is not too late, the last time that xenophobia was not stoped it cost over 80 million lives, this time it will be way worse.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kstenerud 7y agoThe reason why extremism is having more trouble taking root in Europe is because there's less inequality there. Where inequality is highest, terrorism is highest.
- onetwofreddy 7y ago.
- belltaco 7y agoWhy does Trump need to be asked before revealing anything? All this looks like a thinly veiled ploy by Q to try and get free publicity from media. If that doesn't happen, fool people enough to make them think it is some kind of "proof".
- onetwofreddy 7y ago.
- belltaco 7y agoWhat's stopping Trump from telling us?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0129 7y agoMy friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums. But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younger friends where I see the early signs of hate growing. My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up, making them socially illfit, making them outcasts and making them blame everything on immigrants and so on when they can't find a girlfriend or friends.
- NetOpWibby 7y agoOh damn, my condolences.
- throwaway0129 7y agoThank you, I appreciate it.
- codingslave 7y agoI think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees. But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.
- solipsism 7y agoBut I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them Don't go there. Don't say mass shooters aren't at fault. The thing is, you don't need to. Both things can be true -- life is hard and unfair for certain people in certain ways, and that in the aggregate is bound to lead to more mass killings and other negative effects like suicide.. and the ones who decide to kill innocent people are to blame for their disgusting choice. Only the most simplistic and naive ways of thinking try to boil down complex problems into black and white.
- wyldfire 7y agoI think that technology has brought us some truly marvelous things. But they also enable us to avoid casual social contact while enabling us to withdraw from meaningful social contact. Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion. But because of other communities' moderation, they likely become one of the bastions of the racists. So even if their ownership never had any interest in hate speech, their platform becomes a de facto mechanism for its spread. As much problems as anonymity causes I sure don't think that some new Real World Identity driven Internet would be a good idea. But sites with next to no content moderation seem like a bad idea. Not that I can imagine a resolution, really. ~~ I imagine how frustrated I might feel if I didn't have some kind of daily work or creative task to keep me busy and fill me with purpose. If I felt depressed I might be willing to blame it on someone. If everything I read said that in fact there is someone to blame, I wonder: would I be able to see through that? Would I stand up and say 'no, that's wrong: those people aren't the source of our problems'? I like to think I would. But I've definitely caught myself (long after the fact) buying into BS groupthink/hivemind conspiracy hogwash.
- fwip 7y agoYep - 8chan was started because even 4chan wasn't odious enough for them.
- faissaloo 7y agoThis keeps getting repeated but it's not exactly true, 8chan was started because Fredrick Brennan had a shroom trip where he saw an Ouroboros and came up with the idea to make a 4chan where you could make your own board. People then ended up migrating over during GamerGate because Moot was shutting down discussion of it.
- zaksoup 7y ago> [...] shutting down discussion of [gamergate]. My, what an interesting way of saying "banning users posting sexually violent threats"
- chvid 7y agoDoes anyone have an idea of how big 8chan and 4chan is in terms of users? Just from the visible activity in there I can see they must be massive. I think Slate is incorrect in describing them as expression of traditional neo-nazism. To me they are quite their own thing. Born out of Anime culture and gaming-culture becoming a playground for role playing, trash talking, trolling, real-life pranks degenerating into what it is now ... To me they are very hard to understand. You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?
- mLuby 7y agoCould be wrong, but edgy jokes + Poe's Law (sarcasm is uncertain online) would be a strong attractant for actual * ists. They may use it all for plausible deniability cover, but I bet many don't even realize most posts are just joking and think they've discovered an underground movement of people like them. Either way, your outlook changes when you go from the only one with unpopular thoughts that you have to hide to one of an untold multitude in which you can freely express those thoughts and have them validated and reinforced. An HN post 3mo back was insightful in this regard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847437 What I don't know (and am interested to) is this: do * ists on such sites gain members mostly by other * ists finding the community or by converting trolls? Because those two pathways have very different antidotes.
- eej2ya1K 7y agoYou start out by making relatively innocent jokes about jews, and notice that certain portions of the anglosphere left and right really respond to this. Not only do they tell you that you can't say that, they also shower you with threats of violence. Successful troll is successful. So you go a bit further, start moving into actual anti-semitic jokes, conspiracies. Still just for the lulz, but it gets an even better reaction. Meanwhile, your image board/irc buddies, the only people in your life who treat you like a real human being, keep egging you, some of them pointing to the reactions you're getting as proof that there's some kind of underlying truth behind the jokes. "Yeah, sure, the protocols of the elders of zion isn't real, but look at the reactions you're getting for what amounts to lazy trolling! And from people with actual power - political power, media power, financial power..." I think you can see where it goes from here - the road to hell isn't always paved with good intentions, but when turning around means accepting that the people who hate you are right, what are you going to do?
- qwsxyh 7y agoI sure am glad we've reached the point of domestic terrorism and I'm 100% sure people will still go: 1) "Not everyone you disagree with is a nazi" 2) "We shouldn't shut down their opinions, they're just as valid" Because as we can see, that obviously has no negative consequences at all.
- Iv 7y ago1) Of course they will. If they are willing to support terrorist, appearing a bit like an asshole online is not going to be a problem for them. 2) The point about not censoring opinions is not about these opinions being valid, it is about the tools you give the government to decide what should be considered terrorism or not. In France, after the mass shootings, the government took some anti-terrorist measures and almost immediately used these laws to shut down some ecologists protestors around the COP21 meeting. I am fine with many outlets deciding that they don't want to publish racist crap but I am also happy that places like 4chan and 8chan are legal. If you go there, you know it is a sewer but total censorship on internet implies very dystopian filtering capabilities. There is nothing governments would like more than the ability to shut down whistleblowers under the pretense of fighting terrorism.
- belltaco 7y agoWhy has this to be done by the govt? For example, Hackers News filters such things without govt intervention, as do Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to a lesser extent. It has been shown that once you remove a platform, the idea itself dwindles. For example r/fatpeoplehate migrated to Voat but activity has been far far below compared to when it was on Reddit.
- ghostcluster 7y agoDespite the attention these cases get, the US murder rate is half what it was in 1980 https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates
- belltaco 7y agoMurders are frequently family and gang related. Mass shootings of random people are a different thing altogether. How many murders in 1980 were of people that the killer did not know personally?
- armada651 7y agoWhat a relief, I guess we don't have to do anything about people being mass murdered then. /s
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoEmergency services and medicine certainly have improved.
- wisty 7y agoWe could talk about how this is largely a mental health problem. A lot of depressed young men do stupid risky stuff with no concern for their own well-being. I know a few guys who have wrapped their cars around trees. I bet most shooters were just throwing in the towel in a more hateful and dramatic way. I see the main issue as a marketing problem for psychology. Men are focused on solving problems, and I'd bet they see psychology as a bunch of talk-therapy (like it's portrayed on TV shows and movies). Women might want to talk about their problems to find some kind of scapegoat, but men would often rather solve them. The ironic thing is, modern therapy is often quite problem-solving focused. A related issue seems to be that a lot of these guys can't talk to women. As in, they can't ask women out. It's rarely their personalities or looks (look at domestic violence perpetrators if you want to see how awful you can be and still find a girlfriend), it's often that no-one wants to tell them how to ask women out (except on certain dark corners of the internet). Recognising and addressing these kinds of problems means humanising them though. We can humanise Palestinian terrorists and drug dealers, but can we really humanise depressed and nerdy young men? I dunno.
- onetwofreddy 7y ago.
- wisty 7y agoI think that's going a bit far, the MSM can be kinda horrible to everyone. OTOH you'd have to be pretty fringe and controversial to explicitly stick up for young men.
- lumberjack 7y agoIt's not a mental health problem. It's a propaganda problem. These people aren't clinically insane. They are just enveloped in hatred. In particular dehumanization propaganda brainwashed them into seeing others as not even human. If you go to places with decades long conflicts, you'll see this mentality on display everywhere. So it's not a mental health issue. All these people aren't insane. They are just really convinced that some other people are the enemy and that those other people are not even worthy of existing at all and that their life is worthless.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- patientplatypus 7y agoThis is so weird for me. This keeps happening and I just don't get it. The chan* boards are still some of the few places on the internet for people to actually learn something. I went to university, but I feel I only got an education when I started reading and 4chan.org/lit was where I went to learn. This was in my mid-20s - this is where I learned about things like Middlemarch, The Book of Disquiet, If On A Winters Night a Traveler, etc. This (https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/sub https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/sub) is amazing and can be found nowhere else. It's also an anonymous board with people who are quite clearly angry and in pain. Since it's anonymous it prevents backlash for hateful ideologies, but it also means that these people can't be found to be reached and helped. But clearly, the solution can't be to allow hate to be public just to help the haters. It's a sad catch-22.
- charlesism 7y agoIs it complicated? You like a website, and that website is bad for the world. Coco-Cola causes tooth decay regardless of how much I enjoy drinking it.
- faissaloo 7y agoI can relate to what you're describing, 8chan's /tech/ is the reason I picked up C and am dabbling in a bit of Rust and how I learnt about free software and Richard Stallman. You could literally just get rid of /pol/ and 8chan would be measurably better, most non-/pol/acks hate them.
- bojackstorkman 7y agoThis ian't the sort of topic that I normally comment on, but today's events have been particularly disturbing, so I thought I would share what I have experienced. I have seen two very different people that are very close to me radicalized and turned into full-blown white nationalist, violent tinfoil-hat types. In the first case, my brother (let's call him Bill) struggled with uncontrollable anger and violent outbursts for his entire life from the getgo. I've been told that that could be linked to a near-suffocation event that happened to him during birth, though I suspect that may be neither here nor there. Because of his behavioral issues and a terrible juvenile "corrections" system, he spent the majority of his life from the age of twelve through 25 in juvenile detention, jail, and eventually prison. He was in some of the most violent prisons in the United States, and joined a "white power" gang largely for survival. He regularly espoused the exact views detailed in the manifesto on a regular basis whenever he was out. However, after a few years out he sort of naturally came to the conclusion that his whole ideology was bullshit and abandoned it. At present, he no longer holds those views. In case 2, a friend (who I will call Bob), had never been in trouble, never had any family trouble or any serious trauma, started spouting the exact same stuff as Bill used to. He was about 26 when this started, and it was an enormous surprise to everyone he knew. I, being extremely curious by nature and very close to Bob, spent dozens of hours trying to get to the root of what was going on with him to absolutely no avail. The important thing with Bob is, his answer to every question about "Where are you getting that?" was a simple "I read it on 4chan/8chan and I believe it." Every. Single. Time. I realized a couple things. First off, Bob was gone. Every conversation with him was just him repeating *chan talking points over and over again. No amount of appeals to humanity could provoke a novel thought. He kept to his points religiously, and he made it exceedingly clear that he was trying to recruit as much as he could. Secondly, Bill had originally found himself in his situation through systematic dismantling of his humanity, whereas Bob was doing it purely for uh, internet street cred? Bill was able to face the real world after leaving prison and make his own decisions, but Bob carried something (in my opinion, specifically regarding this issue of radicalization) far more insidious around in his pocket. The approval he craved from the chans was something that had to be sated daily, which made (and continues to make) him a terrifying person to be around. My point is that from firsthand experience with people from two very different backgrounds that I am very close to, the 4/8/whatever chans are far scarier when it comes to indoctrination than most people could believe without seeing. TL;DR This issue is far larger and more impactful than nearly anyone would care to admit, and sites like 8chan will likely have an unpredictable and indelible impact on many, many people's lives until it is acknowledged and addressed.
- im3w1l 7y ago> Personal Reasons and Thoughts: My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn't exist. The job of my dreams will likely be automated. (...) It's only mentioned in passing but this may be the most relevant part for HN to discuss.
- charlchi 7y agoMigration, automation, and the meaning of life in the new western world. Someone should write a book for white males, sadly we keep leaving this discussion to neonazis and white supremacists online instead of having it ourselves in the public realm...
- lm28469 7y agoJordan Peterson comes to mind. But even he gets labeled as an """alt-right""" even though he is super moderate when you actually listen to him.
- yes-except-no 7y agoAh, yes, Jordan Peterson, the reasonable enlightened centrist. Jordan "fascists and antifas are the same" Peterson. Jordan "nazis used Zyklon B to kill jews only because they used it for rats before" Peterson. (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jordan-peterson-nazi-apologism-lindsey-graham-holocaust-migrant-caravan-mexican-border-tear-gas-a8659001.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jordan-peterson-nazi-ap...) Jordan "serotonin in lobsters justify the pay gap" Peterson (https://theconversation.com/psychologist-jordan-peterson-says-lobsters-help-to-explain-why-human-hierarchies-exist-do-they-90489 https://theconversation.com/psychologist-jordan-peterson-say...) Jordan "accidentally repeatedly retweets and follows fascists and nazis" Peterson. Jordan "enjoys Sargon of Akkad and Stefan Molyneux" Peterson. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJMCQ94t98k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJMCQ94t98k) Jordan "women have never been discriminated through the course of history" Peterson. Jordan "marriage means consent doesn't matter anymore" Peterson. That Jordan Peterson? Well if he's not straight up far right, he sure as hell is playing them very well and doesn't make him any better than them.
- Jonahgay 7y agoso i was a white nationalist all along, while masterbaiting to random thots. get the normies out !
- Ameo 7y ago4chan and 8chan are cancers upon the internet. The sites themselves and their community members spew toxicity, hate, cynicism, and revulsion wherever they turn up. They revel in trolling, harassment, and offense for the sake of offense. This, as recent events demonstrate, often extends further into deep-seated hatred and racism. I don't know if it's an intrinsic side effect of the 100% anonymous culture or just just the way they developed over time, but there's no denying that they serve as a perfect breeding ground for this kind of indoctrination and degeneration. They're perfect feedback loops - the more time one spends in such places, the more strongly the mindsets they proclaim become rooted and the harder it is to break away. People go in feeling alienated and rejected and stay stuck there, finding a perverse connection in their inability to connect and interact with the rest of society in a positive manner. As a result of fixating on the things that set them apart and consuming endless torrents of content from people similarly afflicted, it makes it even harder for them to escape the feedback loop. Mental illness is rampant among the users there, and instead of people afflicted with it being helped or guided into acceptable patterns of interaction, they're mocked or worse yet praised for the negative behavior they exhibit. I've seen this happen to several friends first-hand. One of the most dangerous and destructive things that I've noticed is a disconnection between ideas and reality that comes out of a broken concept of "irony." A common claim is that people started these communities as places where they would "ironically" pretend to be racist or mentally ill, and as a result they attracted actually racist and mentally ill people who ended up taking over the community from within. I think things go a step further: that people who "ironically" take part in hate speech, homophobia, and other bigoted belief systems end up slipping into believing them themselves. Or rather, the line between irony and reality itself dissolves over time after constant exposure, often at the exclusion of all else. I don't have any ideas for solutions to the problems that these kinds of communities create. Their very design makes eliminating the issues or cutting out bad actors completely next to impossible, and no amount of cleanup work after the fact is going to eliminate what is clearly a deeply-rooted and persistent system. Any attempts to exemplify the sickness of their community will be seen as attacks and just make their beliefs deeper.
- ardani 7y agoNot your Internet, not your community and not your problem. If you say school shootings are your problem, well... Talk to your neighbors, talk to your friends, talk to your family, talk to your children. School shootings are an IRL local community problem. The reason the chans turn so cancerous, is that these people's environments are extremely cancerous to them. To fight this, they concentrate where there's the most (ideo)logical cancer, so they can build mental resistance, learn to recognize the patterns and eventually solve them. I'm not saying they plan this out consciously, but that's how it works out. Best I can tell these people would love to chop wood all days if they'd then be left alone with access to a computer in their free time. To give you an example of what I mean by a "carcinogenic environment" - the "you must go to university before working"-meme. That piece of shit took multiple years out of my life. That's a much more problematic meme than the ones that are shared on 4chan. Chan users are in a deadlock situation where their environment pushes more and more unwanted information on them. They are basically told to get cancer and die by their IRL communities - which, in part, is why they gravitate towards anti-Semitism, the single most effective means of closing down the heart. It's not a pleasant experience but it's a way to survive. Then the literal IDF comes around to shill their communities. Oh, that's nice! That surely won't increase anti-Semitism! Then the FBI, CIA, KGB pile on. "Investigate Russia! We're totally not the CIA!". "Pls post cheese pizza, I'm not FBI I promise sempai". "US govt. corrupt Jewish snakepit! You will die by the sandnigger and the blistering faggot! xo - putin". Now the government is regularly turning up to dump its toxic baggage on the chans. Thanks! --- So, to clear something up, anti-Semitism is totally predictable and caused by Jews: https://laitman.com/2019/08/what-is-the-root-of-all-arab-and-nazi-hate-for-jews-quora/ https://laitman.com/2019/08/what-is-the-root-of-all-arab-and... Good news everyone! Jews are not victims, they have responsibilities and they just have to act on it. You can call Laitman a cult leader or a monk farmer or whatever, but he is studied, he knows his Torah, his Kabbalah and his Talmud, and he is correct. The children of Israel can never truly be victims of anyone but themselves. Talmud 101. Of course, the Talmud also says "don't share this with the gentiles"; well, the tech world is in my heart and Hacker News is a Jewy bunch, so it seems I won't even have to do any Teshuvah for sharing this here. So: can the anti-anti-Semitism meme die already? Chan users know that anti-Semitism is "correct" instinctively. It's hard to avoid when you have the experiential knowledge, but of course it's still possible to mislabel it, e.g. as a different category of "correct", such as "all Jews must die" - no, Jews need to love their neighbor as themselves spiritually as well as physically, and not have the hubris to think that what they think does not matter as long as they do Torah and Mitzvot on a surface level. I'm saying this based on Hebrew, Torah and Kabbalah study. Please weight your words if you choose to respond. --- Posters like parent are framed as just another uninspired Zionist shill; it's not incorrect. Parent contains absolutely zero useful information or empathy for chan users. It's a shallow attempt to demoralize the community by painting a bleak future for it, or to dehumanize them so more people from the tech-o-sphere will start shilling there. You can't speak truthfully with someone who you consider to be the embodiment of a disease. "Treat thy neighbor as thyself" already.
- mikedilger 7y agoThe theory seems to be that white supremacists just naturally wish to commit violent hate crimes and that white supremacists use 8chan to indoctrinate more followers. What if it turns out that white supremacists primary wish is to have their arguments heard by society, but society has instead cast them out and refuses to let them post elsewhere so they can only post on 8chan, and that some of them, mentally unstable, react to being outcast in extreme ways? I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform. I'm certainly not arguing that any of their actions are justified. But if this second view of the situation is more accurate, it suggests a solution to the problem that the first view completely misses. How could we tell the difference? I'm thinking of something more akin to this: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc.... I have to admit ignorance though, I have not read any manifestos (the Christchurch one is illegal for me to read) I am quite unfamiliar with 8chan (I've heard people talk of 4chan and checked it out once when researching the supposed "white power" OK hand symbol hoax) and do not live in America presently so perhaps this speculation is offbase, and I'm happy to be corrected.
- empath75 7y agoSo you basically have no idea what you’re talking about but want to talk about giving a wider platform to nazis?
- mikedilger 7y agoI said "I'm not arguing that they have any good points or that we should give them a platform." Also, admitting ignorance doesn't mean I have "no idea". I've read a bit of psychology on this topic, and feelings of being rejected by society are very powerful motivators.
- c1ccccc1 7y agoJust for the record here: I think it's a good thing when people are willing to admit they're ignorant about certain things. It shows that they are willing to learn and change their minds based on new information.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y agoI believe the World Wide Web is largely positive, but the results like this is truly inevitable. > Or more simply, we’re experiencing the “disruption” of computing that was promised. This is not a value judgment: there are tons of good outcomes of this and there are bad outcomes as well. And what’s a “good” outcome vs a “bad” one is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. - an HN user previously told me. The computing pioneers dreamed the Internet would enable the free and fast flow of information, create decentralization, promote democracy, freedom of speech, and liberate us from all the old forms of political control. In the beginning, things were great. The emergent of the Free Software Movement, the Cypherpunk Movement, and early online commmunities such as The WELL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL) or Usenet all seemed to prove the idealism of the Net. Even today, it still keeps unleashing human creativity. And even when the tech is increasingly used as tools of oppression, arguablly, the Net still significant improved the autonomy of individuals and encouraged free thinking. One core tenet of personal computing and the Net is empowering individuals, "we the people". The pioneers of the Net were revolutionary, they wanted to make the world a better place by digitizing the human society. Unfortunately, whoever was playing with computers and the Internet in the 1980s-1990s were elites. They have received extensive academic trainings, and/or came from the middle class. So the element of populism in the hacker culture played a positive role. And crucially, the development of the Internet was done in parallel of globalization and the economic boom of 80s neoliberalism, so there was no major social conflicts as well. But after 2008-2010, this populist idea started to show its dark side - after (1) all the people and all their dogs have been connected to the web, (2) a tendency of disintegration of the global economic and political order is coming - the same populism stopped playing the original very-positive role. It has became clear that, any idea can by popularized and supported by a free Internet, or propagated more easily (e.g. flat-Earth, anti-vax, extremism). David Perell called it "the disappearance of the Overton window". Also, all individuals are empowered, including marginalized groups, malicious attackers and psychopaths. I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself. * The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220 * Recommended comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914 Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard. We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State. On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate this thing/person is, the justice needs to be done! Sometimes, it can be a legitimate popular movement and serve the right purpose, e.g. Occupy Movement, but other times, it's just a bunch of angry mobs lynching people. For example, a list of people on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Especially, when I grasped these points, I found things went pretty stupid when, for example, the mainstream media started reporting Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in 2016. Yes, it has connections to reactionary political movements, but itself is only a symbol of the trolling cultural. When the media reports it, it actually gives it a platform of exposure, and encouraged trolls to use it as a genuinely political symbol, and personally I think it makes the issue worse. What I'm trying to say is, to solve problems like this, we must study and understand the entire machinery of it, including the underlying social-economical basis of this conflict using sociology and psychology, and to provide social solutions to the problem. However, the only proposal the mainstream media (or us, as online members of online communities) has right now is "Twitter and Facebook should ban hate speech", or "we should not feed the trolls", which hardly touches deeper problems. Also, when the important argument for Internet freedom is that they bring democracy and equality no longer works, should the Internet be free and open? Should we still protect and promote the freedom speech? I firmly believe the answer must be YES. However, if we left these problems unaddressed and only "ban them", the answer is going to be "no" soon. Furthermore, I think that stochastic terrorism can not be 100% eliminated without creating a police state, which is more harmful than a few terrorists. Lone-wolf terrorism is a feature in modern life, we can only enhance our understanding of sociology to partially reduce the harm. P.S: Watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, its plot has a surprising deep discussion of the consequences of a hyperconnected humanity, meme culture and random terrorism is an important theme in the show, and contains great inspirations. ---- Appendix: David Perell's excellent 13,000 word essay, "What the Hell is Going On?" [1], examines and analyzes the current chaos in politics, business and education, and concluded that it was caused by the transformation from a information-deficient to a information-rich society, and has a similar argument just like mine. Also, if you want to understand more about the trolling culture and its mechanism, I recommend "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture", by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press. [1] https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on
- trax 7y agoA lot of posters here fail to understand chan culture and are not familiar with any of the boards. They try to analyze those platforms from the outside, with many biases. Please don't, unless you've lurked a couple of boards for some time, you're making a fool out of yourself. The fact that you have pseudo-anonymity doesn't mean that the platform with be one way or another. People say that chans are racist, but I've seen plenty of examples of left-wing threads on 4chan's /pol/. 8chan has it's own /leftypol/ board, which is doing very very well traffic wise and even spawned some left chans. I used to frequent /leftypol/, and even made some friends along the way. The problem is that sometimes the communities get unhinged from the lack of external influence because they create a feedback loop. I think the people that snap will do so in any community. The thing is that on those platforms you can see people posting what they really think, because they're not constrained by reputation or doxxing. You could engage with some of the posters there and dissuade them. Otherwise, nothing can change. You can't bring it down the platforms too, because plenty others will pop-up. The fragmentation will create many more insulated communities. There are chans on IPFS and the darkweb, so good luck with that. Something interesting that myself and others on the boards have noticed is a subversion of /pol/ by means of gradual but constant anti right-wing commenting and thread making. That, in combination with an influx of redditors, changed the culture of the board a bit. This creates a lot of friction inside the community. I don't know where it's going, but it's not a static monolith. The demographics of the boards change and they're being influenced. I'm curious what the future holds. PS. I don't want to get into why it's not racist in the way that a typical person believes, but that would make the post too long.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago...how have things gotten objectively worse for young men?
- charlchi 7y agoIf you think the male suicide rate and mass shootings have anything to do with some kind of "objectively worse" metric you're not thinking about this in the right way...
- mieseratte 7y agoInstead of telling folks that they’re wrong, how about you explain why.
- mikelyons 7y agoThe problem with low-awareness is that it think's its high-awareness.
- noobermin 7y agoMen are half the population. Many men are poor, have lack of job opportunities, just like poor women. Identity politics that completely ignores economic conditions people face will always be flat and can't explain the depth of complexity different people in society face.
- mikelyons 7y agoWhat causes the much higher incidence of homelessness in males compared to females?
- watwut 7y agoThey are more likely to fit into risk factor profile: more likely to have mental disease. They are more likely to be veterans. More likely to be addicted addictions or disabled. Also more likely to be violent or aggressive and thus kicked from legit places to live. More likely to have criminal record. The whole "on average men take their aggression against others women again themselves" in this aspect hurt men more. Some of the above are related to each other, obviously.
- aaron695 7y agoPlease don't give the disgusting Slate clicks. They are part of the problem. Bellingcat's analysis of CC and Walmart, are accurate, neutral and don't help continue the cycle. They actually try and understand what's happening unlike Slate which is just firing off volleys in their own sick way. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-p... https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/christchurch/ https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/christchurch/
- fapjacks 7y agoPeople seemed to have invented writing to keep track of grain inventories, and to record for all eternity the great moral decline of the world caused by the doings of the author's political enemies, and if only they had the tools to stop the Bad Ideas from spreading, why, we could all live a utopian existence of pure harmony.
- inawarminister 7y agoThe first dictatorship to crack the secret of the mind will be the first eternal regime, in all likelihood. For a certain definition of eternity, at any rate.
- mikelyons 7y agoWhat do you think Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and 1 or 2 others have done?
- executive 7y agoSo is Facebook Live
- zapita 7y agoIt was recently revealed that 8chan is funded primarily by selling sex tourism-themed audio books on Amazon. To my knowledge, Amazon has still not answered requests for comments, nor have they discontinued funding. Here's the article: https://popular.info/p/exclusive-how-money-flows-from-amazon https://popular.info/p/exclusive-how-money-flows-from-amazon
- toxik 7y agoWhile some of the audio books are somewhat unpalatable, it is only some. This article seems really angled though, is 8ch.net really so dangerous?
- irvwash 7y agoJim Watkins owns a lot of things, including 2channel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel), a pig farm, and a VPS/VPN/webhosting provider. It's unlikely that those audiobooks are the biggest source of income.
- fuddcoinn 7y agoTo anyone who made it this far, to my comment, i implore you to fufill this obligation - the obligation to address the Judeah Question. It is your obligation to momentarily take it seriously that J3ws, who openly control media, finance, Hollywood, and plenty else and aim to fufill their own self admitted, religious prophecy of ownership of the entire world and all people as slaves. their finance system is in the endgame as we speak, and I'll spare you the details but no serious individual would describe that system as anything other than intentionally oppressive, publicly known as such, and breaking down in ways that cause immense suffering. Hollywood is at its wits end, and any serious individual wouldn't dare deny the HIGHLY probable likelihood that 'The Fappening' release of sexual images of countless Hollywood women was STANDARD procedure by the likes of Harvey Weinstein. do the research. don't insult the intelligence of those of us paying attention at the price of the suffering of these women, or future victims. and now we have Jeffrey epstein, the coup de grae - the "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS" win, again. here we have a child rapist blackmail mossad operation that for all intents and purposes, RULES OVER YOU. did you know the Jewish Jeffrey epstein didn't have a single Jewish victim ? NOT ONE. as per their holy book. we are talking thousands, folks. and their books say jews can have sex with Goy/gentile children, boys and girls. and they can kill non Jews, in many cases. and might you be aware that transgenderism was on the way in Weimar Germany? BuzzFeed writes about it. FUFILL YOUR OBLIGATION TO THE TRUTH. go research it. did you also know the drugs the modern day transgender individual needs to survive are exclusively made in Israel? it goes on and on and on and one of the things that goes on and on is that they have been expelled from 109 countries throughout history. for many of the same reasons. don't hear a lot about that, now do we? the world's most victimized victims who love to talk about all the horrible things done to them sure do leave out a large amount of "WHY". would it be impossible that maybe they have a responsibility in the way they have been treated??? now with all this emotional talk about a body count that is less than the amount killed in chicago on this past July 4th weekend, you want to speak of virgins who can't get laid, hatred and misunderstanding on a stupid message board, some kind of 'white' guilt or white fear while you try to ignore the drugs and homeless in San Francisco and pretend it's just happenstance but allow me to spoil the ending of FUFILLING YOUR OBLIGATION by telling you that Israel has their boot on your neck. you can't run, you can't hide, only the Jew or those who have not FUFILLED THEIR OBLIGATION to the research of the truth will tell you it is not true. and yes they talk about this on the Chan's, and yes Israel has been caught killing Americans to foment war, and yes they have admitted to it, and yes this topic is MYSTERIOUSLY missing from this shooters "manifesto" and the other shooters manifestos, and yes if you haven't figured this out by now then the day is NIGH that you will be the LAST TO KNOW AND THE LAST TO FUFILL YOUR OBLIGATION TO THE TRUTH AND TO SOCIETY/HUMANITY. thank you, God bless
- HNLurker2 7y agoGood thing I've got banned on 4chan for a whole year
- 8456523 7y agoThe 4-page manifesto posted yesterday: https://egbertowillies.com/2019/08/03/patrick-crusius-manifesto/ https://egbertowillies.com/2019/08/03/patrick-crusius-manife...
- jrnichols 7y agoHas that been verified as actually being his? Twitter reports were saying that it was a hoax and hasn't been attributed to the El Paso criminal.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ypcx 7y agoSaying that "XYZ media outlet is a normal part of mass shoothing now" is a hypocrisy, because 1. the real problem you should be focusing on is why "Mass shootings are a normal part of the society now", 2. hate can and will be "farmed" in the next outlet, if we ban one. You could go as far as outlawing anonymous internet access (require identity in all online actions), but people with these intentions would still find a way to congregate and develop/use a specific language to evade detection and control. We really need to start looking hard at what causes pressure build-ups in our society and start working on alleviation of these, because while the side effects of anti-depression medication may act as the last-mile enabler in these special cases, it's not the core problem and as such will deflect our attention from solving the core problem/problems. (I'm not touching the gun-control issue. E.g. in London or Japan, they will kill you with a knife. Tomorrow it may be a chemical weapon. Etc.) In my experience the biggest problem is paradoxically the lack of communication from the side of the government to the side of the people. Many controversial programs can be explained in a common language so that an information vacuums aren't created and then filled by "conspiracy theorists". E.g. clearly explain the logic behind immigration policies (democrats), explain the logic behind fiscal policies (the FED, the ECB), the logic behind taxation rates, and so on. I'm not saying that governments are perfect or that there is zero truth in some conspiracy theories, but I see the lack of information flow be the biggest issue because it causes people's disbelief in their governments' actions and that breeds all sorts of problems.
- DanBC 7y agoIt's not just 8Chan. Violence is now normalised across a range of sites. Here's Breitbart:https://twitter.com/EJGibney/status/1157809158902681600?s=20 https://twitter.com/EJGibney/status/1157809158902681600?s=20
- newshorts 7y agoI believe the solution is more systemic; part media, part economic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism
- brynjolf 7y agoReddit is also a big part of it but as long as Steve Huffman aka spez gets the sweet money from Thiel he is fine with having lots of blood on his hands. He probably is one of the godfathers of alt right now. What is the blood of innocents worth when you can make money? Nothing.
- rolltiide 7y agoIts a normal part of me looking up manifestos and videos that other media sites dance around when I want to know what happened. I'll browse a twitter thread for a good 30 seconds after being made aware of a mass shooting, if everyone is congratulating each other for not saying someone's name and not posting the gopro video I'll just go straight to 4chan or 8chan.
- antpls 7y agoAccording to gunviolencearchive (https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/), there were 251 mass shootings in the USA since the beginning of 2019. I don't know if this number is correct, but I just can't understand why guns are still allowed in USA.
- colejohnson66 7y agoThose numbers usually include suicides
- resoluteteeth 7y agoThe American right believes that it needs guns to protect itself from the government and is terrified that the left will come to take its guns away. This has gotten more and more extreme to the point that they are now basically against any gun control laws including restrictions on machine guns or any sort of background checks.
- DuskStar 7y ago> This has gotten more and more extreme to the point that they are now basically against any gun control laws including restrictions on machine guns or any sort of background checks. You are aware that ownership of machine guns is both extremely restricted and rather expensive, while almost all legal gun transfers require a background check, right? (The transfers that don't require a background check are private sales in certain states) Or are you saying that people want these restrictions to be rolled back?
- resoluteteeth 7y ago> Or are you saying that people want these restrictions to be rolled back? This. As far as I am aware, the NRA is now believes people should be able to own fully automatic weapons although that wasn't always their position. (And they obviously are against restrictions on semiautomatic weapons since their California division had sued the government about them.)
- 7y ago
- john_brown_body 7y agoA focus on the mediums through which these shooters express their views misses the forest for the trees, which is that this is fundamentally a political problem. There is an ascendant political ideology in the United States, and in the West more broadly, that is rooted in a fear that White supremacy is being eroded by immigration and demographic change, and that violence against minority populations is an acceptable response to these changes. This ideology is promoted by the President and prominent members of the Republican Party and the party-affiliated media; government goon squads are used to harass and ethnically cleanse those populations; and "lone-wolf" paramilitaries terrorize them directly, while allowing their "respectable" enablers and ideological supporters some degree of plausible deniability. The solution to this problem doesn't lie in technology or communication platforms or mental health awareness or anything like that. It lies in organizing politically to defeat the supporters of this ideology and take power away from its proponents.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago- Even if by Sybil attacks that ideology is numerically irrelevant, the media amplifies their message and drowns out other messages. Bernie was attacked by centrists for doing an interview on Fox News, it's not just the Republicans contributing to the current state of affairs. - For Trump to support neo-nazis he doesn't even need to praise them (even though he does it anyway), just selectively unenforce their actions. Inaction can be a political statement.