5 ms·

Isn’t the concern about the gradual radicalization that occurs in these online communities, and not about specific posts that threaten violence or announce impe

by baddox 7y ago

Isn’t the concern about the gradual radicalization that occurs in these online communities, and not about specific posts that threaten violence or announce impending mass shootings?

internet_user 7y ago
Has it occurred to you that radicalization actually happens offline, perhaps even in childhood, due to some kind of real life events, and nothing to do with internet at all? All of this rooted in meatspace. The so called "social defeat". How often do you see successful people that have a fullfilling life go on rampages?
- geofft 7y ago
  Certainly the radicalization may happen offline. But in the cases at hand, it did not. There is a significant uptick in violence associated with online radicalization, and no corresponding uptick in violence associated with offline radicalization. You can say that the role of the internet is overblown, but the evidence is there. Besides, it's a sort of weird position to take on an a) online forum b) of tech people that the internet does not have a significant role in facilitating communication that would not otherwise happen.
  - internet_user 7y ago
    where is the data? you have something that proves causality of online communication and radicalization? You make it sound it's almost like terrorism didn't exist before the internet.
    - geofft 7y ago
      > where is the data? All of these shooters have manifestos that describe how they came to believe what they believed. > You make it sound it's almost like terrorism didn't exist before the internet. No, I don't. I specifically said "uptick." This line of argument makes as much sense as showing up in a comment thread about the Capital One breach and saying "You make it sound it's almost like privacy violations didn't exist before the internet." Of course it did, but not at this scale, and we're talking about scale.
  - bloaf 7y ago
    There has been a significant uptick in everything online over the last 25 years because in that time the internet population has grown from 0.5% of the worlds population to over 55%. Literature says that the internet does facilitate extremist communication/nucleation, but does not replace the meatspace as the primary radicalization agent. https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/93/5/1233/4098292 https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/93/5/1233/40982...
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Radicalization tends to be a function of getting access to a group of like-minded people who agree with your angry/hostile/prejudiced views while simultaneously being socially cut off from moderating influences. The internet is able to connect isolated individuals with that group of like-minded people. One of the dangers of Internet access to such is people who only know you online may feel more comfortable with encouraging your radicalization than if it was in person because they aren't in immediate danger, nor at high risk of being asked to participate, etc. It can seem inconsequential to agree with extremist statements. People who might hesitate to agree in person may not hesitate to agree on a discussion board. There are good and bad things that come out of the relative freedom to speak our minds online. Opportunity for radicalization is one of the bad things that comes of it.
  - internet_user 7y ago
    What makes such people seek out like-minded people, the "radicals"? The roots are firmly in the meatspace. The seed was planted well before he know what 8chan was.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      Sure, but if he can't find a group in person that will validate and amplify his views and also can't find such online, he will probably remain some run-of-the-mill uncouth jackass without feeling so strongly about it that shooting up a mall seems like a good idea he should totally act upon. There have been studies. Radicalization is generally the product of a social environment that magnifies certain views and actively encourages people to become more extreme.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      Seems like you're assuming your conclusion as your premise.
      - internet_user 7y ago
        I assume the cause of such behavior is something that's known properly as "social defeat".
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Sure, and people may be driven to check out extremist ideology because of IRL emotional injuries or problems, but that doesn't mean the internet aspect is overblown. I've probably met more people through the internet than via casual socialization.
  - internet_user 7y ago
    overblown, as in, it is very hard to believe emotional injuries sustained over the internet are as bad as social defeat IRL.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Unlikely. Media technologies are technologies for disseminating ideas. Different technologies lie on different points of the spectrum between one-to-many and many-to-many. Broadcast television, and radio to a lesser extent, is very close to a one-to-many media. There might be a small handful of national networks that can disseminate ideas, and they can only do so in ways that are easy to detect and control by authorities. In an authoritarian state like the Soviet Union there might be only state-controlled broadcasting and it really was one-to-many. In a free country like the United States, you might end up with 3-4 broadcast networks. That's not enough to get a broad spectrum of opinion, which is why the midcentury Overton window was so narrow compared to today. Cable and satellite television went closer to many-to-many. (Print is also closer to many-to-many than radio and television, but radio and television are more popular since they don't require the effort of reading or the skill of literacy in order to consume, so the presence of radio and television reduces the impact of print.) This broadens things a bit because then you can watch Fox News, though the biggest reason for Fox News was probably an unmet market niche. The broadcast networks plus CNN, for various reasons (likely the internal biases of the journalists themselves), had drifted to a noticeable center-left bias by the 1990's. This left a massive opportunity for a right-biased news network to capture a rough half of the market that was "underserved" to some extent. Conservative talk radio was a similar story. Print was somewhat more broad, but even then, there were usually small numbers of "respectable" opinionated magazines you could buy on either side of the spectrum (e.g. National Review, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard, etc.) but publication was a big enough hurdle that these outlets often served as moderating voices (e.g the National Review effectively excluding the John Birch Society or Ayn Rand from the "respectable right"). The internet is an extremely many-to-many platform. I mean, I'm just some random idiot you've probably never met and now you're hearing all of my thoughts about something of national importance. That's pretty fucking insane when you think about it. And just like cable, talk radio, and publishing slightly widen the bounds of the Overton Window compared to the broadcast television oligopoly, the internet has done something potentially even worse. I don't think there is a single Overton Window at all anymore. And the old media can't handle this. In another era, this National Review cover alone (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a21e51c08a80431d8b8f42-750-990.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a21e51c08a80431d8b8...) would have completely ended a Republican candidate. In today's era, that man is the President. Similar forces have normalized people like Bernie Sanders, someone who actually existed for a long time but would never have become a national figure in an earlier era. And yeah, I really think this is all part of the same mechanism. People like Timothy McVeigh were radicalized in person. There aren't that many of him. There are a lot of small scale domestic terror attacks and at times even entire mobs of people (Charlottesville for one example, Portland antifa for another example) who commit acts of political violence. And the more these kinds of events happen, and are publicized, the more this type of behavior becomes normalized, becomes something within the realm of things people think about as something that someone might do in a given situation.
xfitm3 7y ago
Isn't banning/silencing communities like these the real radicalization?
- ebg13 7y ago
  They're not being banned or silenced. They're being told "get off my property".
- meddlepal 7y ago
  CloudFlare is under no obligation to serve 8chan. There is nothing radical about denying service to unprotected classes of people you don't want in or using your business. I would agree this is a problem if the US Government was trying to suppress speech.
- cthulha 7y ago
  You have an implicit model of how radicalization works which is out of sync with the model others are applying. The counterexample is that, when racist/fascist/white supremacist content became easier to access through online unmoderated forums such as 4chan, the level of online & offline activity and recruitment became higher. Secondly, it's hardly news to these communities that they are disliked by others. Have you met an Edgelord?
slg 7y ago
And the grandparent's comment about there being boards for other topics is why the radicalization is such a problem (the same thing applies to Reddit and Youtube's recommended video algorithm). The normal content is what attracts people to the site, but once there, they see the radicalized content mixed in with it. This ends up normalizing the radicalized content making it easier to recruit new members. Very few people will go out of their way to go to the Daily Stormer or some other site dedicated specifically to hate. But it is easier to be lured in when that content is just a part of the site.
- the8472 7y ago
  > The normal content is what attracts people to the site, but once there, they see the radicalized content mixed in with it. I don't think this argument holds when the boards are compartmentalized. Otherwise you could generalize it to the internet as a whole, where things are also compartmentalized into sites.
  - slg 7y ago
    You are right in a certain aspect that 8chan is more compartmenalized than Reddit or Youtube, but there is still a world of difference in the discoverability of the various boards on 8chan versus the internet at large. A non-radicalized 8chan user can end up on /pol out of mere curiosity and be pulled in. No one visits the Daily Stormer without a predisposition to hate.
    - the8472 7y ago
      A hyperlink is all it takes to stumble into another site.
      - nimonian 7y ago
        I understand. However, I think when one site becomes a domain for this behaviour (and domain is and important word here, in both senses) then the effect is different.

by baddox 7y ago

Isn’t the concern about the gradual radicalization that occurs in these online communities, and not about specific posts that threaten violence or announce impending mass shootings?

internet_user 7y ago

Has it occurred to you that radicalization actually happens offline, perhaps even in childhood, due to some kind of real life events, and nothing to do with internet at all? All of this rooted in meatspace. The so called "social defeat". How often do you see successful people that have a fullfilling life go on rampages?

geofft 7y ago
Certainly the radicalization may happen offline. But in the cases at hand, it did not. There is a significant uptick in violence associated with online radicalization, and no corresponding uptick in violence associated with offline radicalization. You can say that the role of the internet is overblown, but the evidence is there. Besides, it's a sort of weird position to take on an a) online forum b) of tech people that the internet does not have a significant role in facilitating communication that would not otherwise happen.
- internet_user 7y ago
  where is the data? you have something that proves causality of online communication and radicalization? You make it sound it's almost like terrorism didn't exist before the internet.
  - geofft 7y ago
    > where is the data? All of these shooters have manifestos that describe how they came to believe what they believed. > You make it sound it's almost like terrorism didn't exist before the internet. No, I don't. I specifically said "uptick." This line of argument makes as much sense as showing up in a comment thread about the Capital One breach and saying "You make it sound it's almost like privacy violations didn't exist before the internet." Of course it did, but not at this scale, and we're talking about scale.
- bloaf 7y ago
  There has been a significant uptick in everything online over the last 25 years because in that time the internet population has grown from 0.5% of the worlds population to over 55%. Literature says that the internet does facilitate extremist communication/nucleation, but does not replace the meatspace as the primary radicalization agent. https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/93/5/1233/4098292 https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/93/5/1233/40982...
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Radicalization tends to be a function of getting access to a group of like-minded people who agree with your angry/hostile/prejudiced views while simultaneously being socially cut off from moderating influences. The internet is able to connect isolated individuals with that group of like-minded people. One of the dangers of Internet access to such is people who only know you online may feel more comfortable with encouraging your radicalization than if it was in person because they aren't in immediate danger, nor at high risk of being asked to participate, etc. It can seem inconsequential to agree with extremist statements. People who might hesitate to agree in person may not hesitate to agree on a discussion board. There are good and bad things that come out of the relative freedom to speak our minds online. Opportunity for radicalization is one of the bad things that comes of it.
- internet_user 7y ago
  What makes such people seek out like-minded people, the "radicals"? The roots are firmly in the meatspace. The seed was planted well before he know what 8chan was.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Sure, but if he can't find a group in person that will validate and amplify his views and also can't find such online, he will probably remain some run-of-the-mill uncouth jackass without feeling so strongly about it that shooting up a mall seems like a good idea he should totally act upon. There have been studies. Radicalization is generally the product of a social environment that magnifies certain views and actively encourages people to become more extreme.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Seems like you're assuming your conclusion as your premise.
    - internet_user 7y ago
      I assume the cause of such behavior is something that's known properly as "social defeat".
anigbrowl 7y ago
Sure, and people may be driven to check out extremist ideology because of IRL emotional injuries or problems, but that doesn't mean the internet aspect is overblown. I've probably met more people through the internet than via casual socialization.
- internet_user 7y ago
  overblown, as in, it is very hard to believe emotional injuries sustained over the internet are as bad as social defeat IRL.
philwelch 7y ago
Unlikely. Media technologies are technologies for disseminating ideas. Different technologies lie on different points of the spectrum between one-to-many and many-to-many. Broadcast television, and radio to a lesser extent, is very close to a one-to-many media. There might be a small handful of national networks that can disseminate ideas, and they can only do so in ways that are easy to detect and control by authorities. In an authoritarian state like the Soviet Union there might be only state-controlled broadcasting and it really was one-to-many. In a free country like the United States, you might end up with 3-4 broadcast networks. That's not enough to get a broad spectrum of opinion, which is why the midcentury Overton window was so narrow compared to today. Cable and satellite television went closer to many-to-many. (Print is also closer to many-to-many than radio and television, but radio and television are more popular since they don't require the effort of reading or the skill of literacy in order to consume, so the presence of radio and television reduces the impact of print.) This broadens things a bit because then you can watch Fox News, though the biggest reason for Fox News was probably an unmet market niche. The broadcast networks plus CNN, for various reasons (likely the internal biases of the journalists themselves), had drifted to a noticeable center-left bias by the 1990's. This left a massive opportunity for a right-biased news network to capture a rough half of the market that was "underserved" to some extent. Conservative talk radio was a similar story. Print was somewhat more broad, but even then, there were usually small numbers of "respectable" opinionated magazines you could buy on either side of the spectrum (e.g. National Review, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard, etc.) but publication was a big enough hurdle that these outlets often served as moderating voices (e.g the National Review effectively excluding the John Birch Society or Ayn Rand from the "respectable right"). The internet is an extremely many-to-many platform. I mean, I'm just some random idiot you've probably never met and now you're hearing all of my thoughts about something of national importance. That's pretty fucking insane when you think about it. And just like cable, talk radio, and publishing slightly widen the bounds of the Overton Window compared to the broadcast television oligopoly, the internet has done something potentially even worse. I don't think there is a single Overton Window at all anymore. And the old media can't handle this. In another era, this National Review cover alone (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a21e51c08a80431d8b8f42-750-990.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a21e51c08a80431d8b8...) would have completely ended a Republican candidate. In today's era, that man is the President. Similar forces have normalized people like Bernie Sanders, someone who actually existed for a long time but would never have become a national figure in an earlier era. And yeah, I really think this is all part of the same mechanism. People like Timothy McVeigh were radicalized in person. There aren't that many of him. There are a lot of small scale domestic terror attacks and at times even entire mobs of people (Charlottesville for one example, Portland antifa for another example) who commit acts of political violence. And the more these kinds of events happen, and are publicized, the more this type of behavior becomes normalized, becomes something within the realm of things people think about as something that someone might do in a given situation.

xfitm3 7y ago

Isn't banning/silencing communities like these the real radicalization?

ebg13 7y ago
They're not being banned or silenced. They're being told "get off my property".
meddlepal 7y ago
CloudFlare is under no obligation to serve 8chan. There is nothing radical about denying service to unprotected classes of people you don't want in or using your business. I would agree this is a problem if the US Government was trying to suppress speech.
cthulha 7y ago
You have an implicit model of how radicalization works which is out of sync with the model others are applying. The counterexample is that, when racist/fascist/white supremacist content became easier to access through online unmoderated forums such as 4chan, the level of online & offline activity and recruitment became higher. Secondly, it's hardly news to these communities that they are disliked by others. Have you met an Edgelord?

slg 7y ago

And the grandparent's comment about there being boards for other topics is why the radicalization is such a problem (the same thing applies to Reddit and Youtube's recommended video algorithm). The normal content is what attracts people to the site, but once there, they see the radicalized content mixed in with it. This ends up normalizing the radicalized content making it easier to recruit new members. Very few people will go out of their way to go to the Daily Stormer or some other site dedicated specifically to hate. But it is easier to be lured in when that content is just a part of the site.

the8472 7y ago
> The normal content is what attracts people to the site, but once there, they see the radicalized content mixed in with it. I don't think this argument holds when the boards are compartmentalized. Otherwise you could generalize it to the internet as a whole, where things are also compartmentalized into sites.
- slg 7y ago
  You are right in a certain aspect that 8chan is more compartmenalized than Reddit or Youtube, but there is still a world of difference in the discoverability of the various boards on 8chan versus the internet at large. A non-radicalized 8chan user can end up on /pol out of mere curiosity and be pulled in. No one visits the Daily Stormer without a predisposition to hate.
  - the8472 7y ago
    A hyperlink is all it takes to stumble into another site.
    - nimonian 7y ago
      I understand. However, I think when one site becomes a domain for this behaviour (and domain is and important word here, in both senses) then the effect is different.