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Who Owns 4chan?
- busterarm 4y agoShouldn't Discord be more under the limelight for the recent mass-shootings than 4chan?
- mlindner 4y agoHow about thinking that specific online discussion platforms are entirely irrelevant to the question at hand?
- foolfoolz 4y agoa broadcasting platform has much more appeal to mass shooters than any basic image board
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- busterarm 4y agoI mean, I was being sarcastic anyway and this article is lies and horseshit... I was just trying to take the author's thought process in the logical direction that it should have gone. Except I'm sure Discord's investors would be extremely unhappy with WIRED if they were to do so...whereas 4chan's investors are Japanese and outside of the SV bubble...so I guess fuck 'em?
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- lupire 4y agoWhy?
- busterarm 4y agoBuffalo shooting was planned on Discord and streamed on Twitch. There's also accusations that the Buffalo and Austin shooters were both members of the same discord server.
- reaperducer 4y agoThere was a shooting in Austin?
- busterarm 4y agoSorry, Uvalde.
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- krapp 4y agoIt's OK, it's hard to keep track of which mass shooting is which at this point. Maybe we should name them like hurricanes.
- reducesuffering 4y agoYa, what? Austin's shooting was soo 11 months ago. /s https://www.kxan.com/investigations/6th-street-mass-shooting-suspect-set-to-appear-in-court-tuesday/ https://www.kxan.com/investigations/6th-street-mass-shooting...
- jimmygrapes 4y agoI didn't know the FBI had a discord server! /s.... I hope
- dleslie 4y agoThe USA has so many mass shootings that I'm not sure which shootings you're referring to. The most important question Americans should be asking is why the USA is the only country in the G8 where this is normal.
- chrisseaton 4y agoDiscord is a piece of software rather than a particular community like 4chan.
- andromeduck 4y ago4chan is no more a "particular community" than reddit or discord is.
- chrisseaton 4y ago4chan has its own style and memes and things, and is a group of people. People use Discord to run everything from their business to their e-sports team. Like criticising email it’s just a tool not a particular community.
- busterarm 4y ago4chan is several communities of people, just like reddit or discord but way smaller. Nobody reads all of 4chan. It's not a monoculture. People read one or two boards and that's it. The cultures of say, /k/ or /m/, are entirely unique to themselves and unlike any other board on 4chan.
- chrisseaton 4y agoAin’t nobody running for example their company office or research symposium on a 4chan board. That’s the difference that should be obvious to anyone.
- ratww 4y agoWell, Discord also has its own styles of memes and things. And 4chan is actually also made of multiple communities, like other people said. Reddit is probably a closer comparison, or maybe Facebook, with the difference that Discord requires an app and login and is not really "web". It's complicated. Sure, nobody is running their workplace chat on those, but it doesn't negate that Discord is sort of a Reddit-like aggregate of communities for many people.
- malwarebytess 4y agoNo because 4chan is heckin' problematic, ya'll.
- busterarm 4y agoAnd Discord isn't? Isn't this the same Discord whose own trust and safety team leadership were sharing "cub content"[1] on private servers? [1]: Cub content is the furry version of CP, for the uninitiated.
- ogurechny 4y agoIndecent photographs of little puppies?
- busterarm 4y agoNo, sexually explicit artwork depicting sex with puppies, kittens, etc. If you were to do the same thing with children it would be extremely illegal in any civilized country. Also this kind of imagery leads directly to animal sexual abuse, which is a huge but little-talked-about problem. It's despicable and has no place in our society.
- ogurechny 4y agoWhew, I'm so glad that I live in an extremely civilized country that already has an extremely zealous government agency that blocks whole websites for hosting anything like that, up to and including '90s Simpsons porn comics drawn in Paint (this is not a joke). It protects me and it protects my society. However, what you described does not seem to be a “furry version of child porn”.
- Gigachad 4y agoDiscord gets out of this by being more of a communication medium like email than a community like 4chan or twitter. You can use discord without ever seeing hateful material like you can use email. While 4chan does have different boards, they do have a fairly uniform community. Discord hosts hate content, but they don't publish it in the way other social media does. You have to seek out and join these communities.
- cowtools 4y ago>they do have a fairly uniform community. I strongly disagree with this. Although there is some minor overlap between the different boards or *chan sites, the community is hardly uniform. There's a huge difference between the likes of /pol/ and /lgbt/ or /o/ and /b/
- joemazerino 4y agoI cancelled my Wired subscription a year ago. They were a reputable tech news source at one point but now it's all contemporary culture war nonsense.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> I cancelled my Wired subscription a year ago. They were a reputable tech news source at one point No, they weren't.
- trav4225 4y agoI thought they were pretty useful until roughly the mid-'90s. They seemed to go into full hype mode at that point, IIRC... I cancelled my sub around that time.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> I thought they were pretty useful until roughly the mid-'90s Wired was founded in the mid-1990s. (First issue was March/April '93).
- trav4225 4y agoYup. They were only interesting to me for 2-3 years. :-)
- smitty1e 4y agoIt was kinda hip the first several years, back in the 90s. I remember that epic Neal Stephenson piece about transatlantic cables: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- cft 4y agoNot sure about their call to action from this hit piece? Make Disney terminate their contract with the alleged 4chan stakeholder? It looks like 4chan has been deplatformed by Revcontent a while back, so they are hoping to stifle it?
- mjfl 4y ago> the inception of QAnon Wasn't QAnon on 8kun, not 4chan?
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- TigeriusKirk 4y agoIt started on 4chan and migrated.
- theknocker 4y ago
- Fargoan 4y agoThe thing I don't get still is how QAnon became so big. Most everyone who was around on the chans and reddit called it out as bullshit at the time. It wasn't even the first account with a similar story. There was FBIAnon first. It's like Minions. Why do middle aged white women like Minions?
- newsclues 4y agoThe media created the circus.
- ogurechny 4y agoIt has been like that since the days of exploding vans. The existence of “investigative articles” written by “respected journalists” like those is still the ultimate planet-scale trolling.
- kwere 4y agoThere was/is a market for that answers. "Science"/ "journalism" is complex, hard and boring. Creating propaganda that rest on the collective culture gut feelings/fears almost feel the next level after edgy memes
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- andrew_ 4y agoMedia company that wants to control narrative, drags outlet that cannot be controlled. News at 11.
- onetimeusename 4y agoHackers on steroids.
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- Fargoan 4y agoI don't know if this is real, but I saw something on Reddit about how the Buffalo and Uvalde shooters were both in the same Discord and on a couple of chan sites called frenschan and 94chan. I think the problem isn't a particular communication platform but a social network that encourages racism and murder. We know from Snowden that the US government has software for mapping out and tracking social networks. Are they doing this in cases like these mass murders? If not, why?
- paulryanrogers 4y agoAre dragnets really the best we can do? Maybe we don't need more guns than people. So when mental illness becomes violent it's blast radius is less destructive.
- adanto6840 4y agoPreface: I agree with you. I'd be really curious to see an "aging report" for firearms that are used/involved in mass-shooting incidents -- I roughly know the answer for the most recent and most newsworthy (read: horrific) incidents. I'd just like to see more data on the topic, specifically 'time from manufacture to use as a murder weapon', to better understand exactly how much potential impact there is. I'm aware private sales exist, and the implication that mentally ill people may turn to private sales, but I'd be curious to see the data on this nonetheless. I'd similarly be curious to see a breakdown/data on "source" of weapons used in incidents like this (and even on attempted/homicides, domestic cases, etc), as well as an aging report -- to better understand how much "impact potential" legislation actually has. While I do support legislation, I'd also like to better understand how impactful it could be and how quickly we might see an impact; I'm also aware of semi-mixed efficacy from (some) prior legislation (state & federal), though I'm personally still in favor of additional legislation, even if only because my 'gut' says it would be a net positive impact.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoConsider also that mental illness might not be so rare or permanent. And if we are all capable of horrendous acts given certain life circumstances then the most effective and practical strategy may be outlawing private gun ownership. Or at least until we can predict mental breakdows and crimes of passion.
- busterarm 4y agoThere's so much "throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks" in this article trying to find something for the reader to get outraged about. Most of it via misrepresentation. I especially enjoyed the author's misunderstanding/misrepresentation of gachimuchi culture, which to a western audience looks straight up like homophobia and gaybashing by the author.
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- tannike 4y agoi'll save you a click it's Hiroyuki Nishimura
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- daenz 4y ago>As the United States grapples with 4chan’s toxic influence The existence of 4chan is a symptom of a sick society, not the cause. The fact people feel the need to express themselves "anonymously" so strongly says a lot about how we're mishandling people we don't agree with.
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- jazzyjackson 4y agoagreed, 4chan is a lot of things but "influential" is not a word that comes to mind
- krapp 4y agoIt's influential with a certain demographic. You'll likely find few if any young white men radicalized into white supremacy who didn't start out as edgelords on /pol/
- Cloudef 4y agoNot only that being anonymous used to be the norm on the internet. Young people were also educated to never reveal their name or private details on the internet. How times have changed.
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- cowtools 4y agoI read a similar article (i suppose it cited this wired article) on Ars Technica this morning. Although it tries to frame the site as some sort of right-wing terrorist incubator, I still found it interesting that the imageboard is owned by a toy company. I don't think these imageboards are or will ever be profitable to operate. If I had to guess, they're funded out of pocket by the likes of "hiromoot" or the owner of this toy company. I really doubt that this japanese toy company is the one pulling the strings behind these terrorist attacks.
- geriatric-janny 4y agoJournalists do this all the time now. They coordinate reporting to manufacture controversy that will hopefully shame advertisers into censoring opinions they find disagreeable. Most of the time it's a massive cope pulled out of their asses in lieu of any real solution to a societal problem. They've accepted the fact that Americans will not stop mowing each other down with military grade weaponry and have redirected their impotent rage towards cheeky memes instead. I'm sure some French motherfucker has written reams on this sort of phenomenon. I dunno if it will work on 4chan though. It has always run on an absolute shoestring budget and is not beholden to any demands to grow.
- compsciphd 4y agoars technica is (has been for a while) owned by conde nast which owns wired. ars reposts wired articles from time to time.
- LeonTheremin 4y agoThere is no anonymity if you connect to 4chan using a Silicon Valley designed processor. The "facts" that these shooters are fed are highly tailored to what they are predisposed to believe already, because the ones posting have complete surveillance of everyone (including of you who reads on HN) and know exactly what to post to create a shooter. Silicon Valley has blood on their hands. 4chan is just one of the places used for these operations.
- jmyeet 4y agoI'd honestly never given much thought to the ownership of 4chan. I think mentally I'd put it in the same bucket as a site like The Pirate Bay, in that the ownership almost doesn't matter. Domains can be seized but the software is out there so it's fairly resilient in that it's easy to set up again. But this is fascinating. Why a Japanese toy company is a part-owner of 4chan is both something I never would've expected. Nor would I have expected it to have various US offices. That could well be its undoing. Given recent events it may finally have reached the attention of the NY AG (mentioned in the article), the DoJ and Congress. A toy maker linking themselves to a platform known for its links to the illegal (including child sexual material) is wild. Why is there no effort to shut that down? Does this say something about Japanese culture in that if a US company had similar links there'd be a public outcry? And why does the US government, who went to extraordinary lengths over Wikileaks, apparently had little to no interest in this until now? I know that Federal agents frequent the site. They're called "glowies" in 4chan-speak but unravelling a corporate structure is something the US tends to do when it suits it. As for 4chan's role in radicalization, I can't help but point out that you cannot radicalize someone to views they weren't already predisposed to believe. The article mentions an incel who frequented /r9k/ (which is the first I'm hearing about this board) and obviously there are the white supremacy links to /pol/. There are base attitudes in both cases that are reasonably normalized. It's why countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan create Islamic extremists rather than any other kind of radical: there are prevelent societal (and understandable I might add; not that I'm justifying extremist violence of any sort to be clear) anti-US attitudes in those countries. Likewise QAnon became a phenomenon because it found fertile ground in existing attitudes with a significant portion of the population. At some point you have to address the underlying attitudes that lead to radicalization.
- pseudo0 4y ago> A toy maker linking themselves to a platform known for its links to the illegal (including child sexual material) is wild. Why is there no effort to shut that down? Does this say something about Japanese culture in that if a US company had similar links there'd be a public outcry? It's fundamentally the same problem that any website faces if it allows user uploaded content. If anything, 4chan was one of the first websites to develop robust procedures for rapidly removing illegal content, given how frequently they had to deal with it in the early-mid 2000s. By the late 2000s, it was pretty rare to see objectionable content before the mods removed it. 4chan's administrators also testified for the government in criminal cases, including the hack of Sarah Palin's emails: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_email_hack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_email_hack If they had shut down the site entirely, there would have been a dozen spinoffs the next day hosted around the world, with owners who wouldn't play ball with the US government.
- dleslie 4y agoAll of this is such Yak Shaving. Oh yes, let's deal with our horror and grief by taking a deep dive into the seedy forums full of expression that is distasteful, and try to imagine that somehow this doesn't exist in other languages or in other cultures. Somehow, this pit of disgust is the cause and source of the horror. But it's not. 4Chan isn't unique it special, it's not an aberration whose existence is solely the cause of the horrific events that America endures again, and again, and again. The question to ask is why America is the only G8 nation where mass shootings, school shootings, are normal and common. It is only in the USA where this is normal. It is a symptom of American culture.
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- ogurechny 4y agoThis is actually not an article about 4chan, it's a pretty straightforward denunciation of Good Smile Company. We can wait and see whether organization behind the attack will surface if it gains momentum. Of course, getting facts right is not a requirement in that genre (quite the opposite), but it's still fun to read that Yotsuba is famous as “4chan mascot” (like Queen Elisabeth is famous because she was on some British stamps or something), and Miku Hatsune is just a “moderately popular SEGA character”. But the most insane assumptions would be that Japanese figurine companies care about Western market, and that you can make money running an imageboard.