I'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 owner

I'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.