21 ms·

Meme group on Discord is focus of uproar over leaked Pentagon documents

94 points by hi5eyes 3y ago

mannyv 3y ago
The NYT characterizes 4chan as a far-right message board, which is ridiculous. I mean, if giving the finger to pretty much everything is considered far-right, then what's considered far-left? Fundamentalism?
- jterrys 3y ago
  It's 2023. The site has been around for 19 years. If they haven't gotten it right by this point, they never will. And its "probably" that way by design.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > then what's considered far-left 4chan. The most notorious boards feel anarchist and were very anti-globalist long before it was fashionable. But as you implied, 4chan as a whole is not homogenous.
  - qtzfz 3y ago
    Anarchism and anti-globalism were far-left values like 20 years ago. Right now the left and far-left give strong "conform" vibes.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      I dunno about that. Radical anti capitalist sentiment, for instance, feels far left and anarchist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_anarchism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_anarchism
      - Kamq 3y ago
        That really depends on the reasoning behind it. The far right has a number of anti-capitalist. Usually around capitalism undermining social order and traditional bonds. If we're talking 4chan specifically still, then the idea that capitalism is a jewish plot to... something? (the what varies a lot as far as I can tell) is probably more likely.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      There is a substantial cohort of 'libs' who started calling themselves 'leftists' post-George Floyd, but when probed about their opinions on e.g. means testing, prison abolition, or asked to define even something as basic as Marxism, miss the mark so widely on the fundaments of those ideas that it appears they've labeled themselves without actually contending with certain core concepts that literally define the distinctions between left folks and others. Of course, the boogeymen borne of tribalistic (politico-cultural) battlegrounds mean that those on the broad right look leftward and see people calling themselves 'leftists' dragging the classical left tenets toward strange, centrist-ized, often authoritarian lines and assume without further evidence that this applies to the left generally. I promise you there's still plenty of folks who competently understand the labels they choose to inhabit.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Both “anarchism” and “anti-globalism” (the former largely as a result of fairly recent cooption, the latter inherently in being a label of opposition not specifically tied to the ideological reason for opposition) have both far-left and far-right versions, and that remains the case. Neither is universal on the left or the right, either, because while anarchism in the narrower historical sense is connected to socialism, there are obviously socialisms that are not anarchist (even without going to the extreme of Lenin/Stalin/Mao vanguardist approaches). I disagree that, within the left and far-left, the anarchist or anti-globalist segments have recently retreated. OTOH, in the United States, the old (peaking around 1990) overlapping center-right neoliberal globalist faction forming the moderate wings of both major parties has faded in the Republican Party, leading the remaining segment of it – which is the dominant faction of the Democratic Party – to be called “left” (and sometimes “far left”) by Republican partisans.
- pcwalton 3y ago
  The board specifically set aside for politics on 4chan is probably the most popular neo-Nazi discussion forum on the internet. "Far-right" is a completely fair description of the political leanings of that site.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    But they have never been "far right" in the way that the traditional racial supremacy kind of neo nazis are. If anything, they are good evidence for horseshoe theory, or perhaps invalidity of the left-right scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      /pol/ most certainly is that way. I've been on 4chan for more than 15 years and I research far right extremism professionally. /pol/ isn't the most right wing or extreme place on the internet, but claiming it's not like 'traditional racial supremacy [..] neo-nazis' is nonsense, that's 20-25% of /pol/ threads.
      - brucethemoose2 3y ago
        Touche, I am not a /pol/ regular. Glimpses of /b/ is about as far as I got, and the Nazism seemed more like trolling and baiting on the surface.
      - TechBro8615 3y ago
        > I research far right extremism professionally Please elaborate. This is a common claim among "disinformation experts," when what they really mean is they occasionally browse /pol/ while telling themselves it's an academic exercise and they're obviously better than everyone posting on that "cesspool." If reading /pol/ for hours a day is enough to say you "research far right extremism professionally," then I'd posit that every one of the most active users of /pol/ is more of an expert on it than any pseudo-intellectual making a spurious claim to authority based on their "professional expertise." By that metric, nearly every one of your "research subjects" is more of an expert than you, so if we want a fair assessment of 4chan, we should probably ask someone who uses it genuinely rather than sanctimoniously.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    Nazis use the internet. You use the internet. Therefore, you're a nazi.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
      Going back to the dinner analogy, you've stretched going to dinner with someone to happening to be in the same restaurant as that someone. It's not the same kind of association at all.
      - izzydata 3y ago
        The entire website is closer to the entire restaurant in this analogy. Posting in the same threads might be similar to sitting at the same table.
    - DiabloD3 3y ago
      That is a false equivalence though. ex: "Nazis eat food, you eat food, therefore you're a Nazi." Doing something that all people do and are expected to do, on either side of the conflict, does not actually make a difference. Being a complete and utter jackass makes the difference.
  - ekam 3y ago
    Guilt by association makes no sense… would this also apply to eg, communists?
    - Entinel 3y ago
      Communist don't want to see the eradication of a single race of people so no I don't think it would.
      - 3y ago
- rsav 3y ago
  [flagged]
- SpaceManNabs 3y ago
  /b/, /vg/, /v/, /pol/ and sometimes /g/ all have strong alt right representation. (actually /g/ is still much more libertarian but you get some bleed in here and there). Even /sci/ has changed. You have race IQ intelligence threads all the time compared to 2011. Instead of the daily Putnam problem thread, you get that garbage. NYT is pretty on the money here. If this were 2010, I'd disagree with them, but not nowadays. disclaimer of my own bias: I stopped using 4chan in 2012 because of how much of an alt right mess it became after /r9k/. Didn't have the words to describe it back then. I remember people making endless Dragon Age memes in the pinned thread in /v/ in response to the mass shooting by a particular Anders in 2011. They were celebrating it, and it was the most active live thread on the site in that moment.
  - YarickR2 3y ago
    Please define alt right, in your own words. It seems everyone claiming 4chan is right, far right, or alt right, means something rather different
    - SpaceManNabs 3y ago
      I am not going to play games with semantics when we can look at the state of the site now compared to before 2011. Do you think that /pol/ is anything but some bastardization of right wing principles?
    - alternatetwo 3y ago
      Alt right is a progranda term by neo nazis for neo nazis, so they don't sound like actual neo nazis. Stop using the term alt right. Alt right means neo nazi. Nothing else.
      - pnt12 3y ago
        Not every racist is a neo nazi, not every leftist is a stalinist. Lumping them together is a cheap tactic to aggravate people, which I think it's dishonest and not very effective.
- netsharc 3y ago
  My guess is (since I don't claim to be a 4chan expert), in the beginning, 4chan users were just being edgy by being trolls and being for the choices that would lead to chaos (by being not politically correct, by supporting Donald Trump), but this attracted many genuine right-wingers, and if they do bother to hang out there, that would mean 4chan has become a far-right message board.
  - antibasilisk 3y ago
    The uptick in unironic racism mostly happened when stormfront discovered 4chan.
- bearjaws 3y ago
  I mean, giving the finger to everything is a pretty common trope amongst the far right. Everyone has their uncle or cousin that says "I am not racist I just hate everyone equally"... It's also a GOP playbook to destroy or disrupt social services and education to then say "look how bad everything is"...
- vkou 3y ago
  Saying 4chan isn't a far-right message board is like saying HN isn't a tech forum, and citing the existence of non-tech threads to support that argument.
- _rmhc 3y ago
  The Something Awful forums are probably the most virulently far left "major" online space at present. They mostly keep the communism will win white genocide now stuff behind the paywall though.
beebmam 3y ago
I think the accusation that 4chan is a far-right message board is accurate, and I believe that accusation can be supported by showing that 4chan's explicitly stated rules can be used to plausibly deny this accusation, while demonstrating that they're are not enforced (or selectively enforced). 4chan's Rule 3: "You will not post any of the following outside of /b/: Troll posts, Racism, Anthropomorphic ("furry") pornography, Grotesque ("guro") images..." These rules are constantly being violated across many of the boards, and moderators rarely take action on some of the boards when posts are reported unless they explicitly violate US law. I've seen so many threads get to 400+ replies and fall off the boards, threads that blatantly violate these rules. The period of time after the 2020 election was brutal, an enormous amount of violent and racist content was not removed. Rules are often even selectively enforced, sculpting narratives that moderator cliques decide on (see /pol/ for example). At some point, it's worthwhile to ask "who benefits?" from these rules not being enforced. The kind of content that doesn't get moderated is strictly far-right stuff.
- tr1ggered 3y ago
  [flagged]
- andrewclunn 3y ago
  Anthropomorphic furry porn is right wing now? I think there are some people for whom "offensive to me," "offensive to others, and "right wing" are equivalent terms. All your post does is prove that you fall into that category. Live Leak death videos and racist jokes are no more "right wing" than pedophilia is "left wing" (which is to say that it isn't). Now some people break down racism in some weird way where bigotry towards Africans or Hispanics is "right wing" and bigotry toward Caucasians and Asians is "left wing," but those people are laughable in their tribalistic thinking and weird politicization of everything.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Have you even been on 4chan before? This isn't some nuanced "what actually is systemic bigotry?" question. "Ni**s and tra**s should all be burned alive and there should be bounties that pay for it" is not a subtle message. Yet it is a sentiment that is visible (and often verbatim) in every thread, and which receives supportive replies.
notjulianjaynes 3y ago
>"Losers. That’s who the U.S. government really has to fear.” The New York Times has published, by my count, 15 articles on this leak in the past 7 days.
- Kenji 3y ago
  [dead]
- colpabar 3y ago
  Could you explain what you’re implying because I don’t get it
  - bakugo 3y ago
    I think the implication here is that, if you write 15 articles in 1 week about people you claim are "losers", maybe you're the loser.
  - notjulianjaynes 3y ago
    It strikes me as somewhat petty that the Times apparently considers the information in the leak important enough to cover so thoroughly, yet they think so little of the source of that information that they'll interview a 20 year old comedy vlogger (haven't watched channel) in the UK to get some quotes painting that source as some sort of right wing extremist group. Maybe they are, but I did not see evidence of such laid out in this article. >But the unfiltered, edgy banter in the wow_mao server, which is called the End of Wow Mao Zone, and in many other servers like it, can sometimes veer into darker territory. Those servers are sometimes described as the less venomous cousins of 4chan, the far-right anonymous message board known for sharing conspiracy theories and popularizing QAnon. Many 4chan users split their time between Discord and 4chan, sharing digital memes and chatting with friends. Emphasis added.
- plaguepilled 3y ago
  >"Losers. That’s who the U.S. government really has to fear.” So... they fear NYT? Does this count as a publication threatening the government?
Apocryphon 3y ago
Is Discord PR active in this thread? TFA centers on that platform, with 4chan being mentioned only a handful of times, yet this thread so far is completely focused on 4chan.
- dmreedy 3y ago
  I think more likely there are just a lot of 4chan users on this site. And some subset of those take perceived attacks like these quite personally.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    I was joking- I think it's just HN being really good at jumping down the wrong rabbit holes and bike-shedding ad nauseam, while completely missing the point of an OP.
    - yodon 3y ago
      >Is Discord PR active in this thread? ... >I was joking This might be a good opportunity to read up again on Poe's law[0]. It pretty much always applies when one tries to make jokes like this on the web. Sarcasm and irony only work as intended when talking with people who know you personally or with people who assume they know your viewpoints. If people don't have reason to believe they know your viewpoint, they hear your sarcasm as literal (and frequently think poorly of you, as a result). [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
      - plaguepilled 3y ago
        Poe's law is hot garbage though. If someone misses context because they're not privy to sarcasm, that isn't automatically the speaker's fault.
        kajaktum 3y ago
        Sarcasm doesn’t work with text based medium. Is this sarcasm?
neonate 3y ago
https://archive.ph/Oia1n https://archive.ph/Oia1n http://web.archive.org/web/20230412204156/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/business/discord-leaked-military-documents.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230412204156/https://www.nytime...
diamondfist25 3y ago
[flagged]
v0idzer0 3y ago
NYT gets so much mileage out of “researchers say” and “experts say” yet they never cite anyone
- ctvo 3y ago
  > Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say. Immediately following this paragraph is a quote from a researcher: > “If you’re a young man with no prospects hanging out on 4chan, you’re definitely on some Discords and probably some pretty dark Discords,” said Dale Beran, a lecturer at Morgan State University and the author of “It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.”
  - mc32 3y ago
    Hmmm this harkens back to “movies influence kids” “music influences kids”, video games influence kids” etc that many people argued in order to censor aspects of music, movies and video games.
  - sbuttgereit 3y ago
    "Dale Beran - Lecturer/ Animation Coordinator , Screenwriting and Animation" Researcher, perhaps, but seems to not be what his credentials or college role is about. https://www.morgan.edu/screenwriting-and-animation/faculty-and-staff/dale-beran https://www.morgan.edu/screenwriting-and-animation/faculty-a...
    - jjeaff 3y ago
      Whether it's valid or not, authoring a book on a particular subject usually qualifies someone as an expert on a subject. Especially if it is on an esoteric and modern subject like online socializing.
      - latency-guy2 3y ago
        I know of someone who published a book on Golang in 2010. The rating of that book is sitting in the 3s out of 5 stars last I checked 6 years ago. Is he an expert at Go? Not in my most humblest opinion, is the content of the book good? Also a no in my honest, must charitable view. How far did he get with showing people how to program with Go? About as far as you'd get in 2 hours on the golang docs even considering a very poorly skilled college student doing the exercises. There's maybe 170 pages in the book. I'm almost certain the book has not reached even 200 sales at the highest. Is he really considered an expert to you, solely because of the publishing of a book? Here it is by the way: https://www.amazon.com/Go-Programming-John-P-Baugh/dp/1453636676 https://www.amazon.com/Go-Programming-John-P-Baugh/dp/145363... I know that's not necessarily your view, but this is the standard we are working with
guardiangod 3y ago
I am sad that Discord has replaced IRC as the chatroom of the internet's subculture.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  IRC lacks widespread support for things like roles, reactions, avatars, threads, showing chat history from before someone enters a channel, search history, and having video and voice chat without piggybacking on top of DCC. There also aren't sync issues within Discord that cause things like netsplits which are somewhat common on IRC I know some newer versions of the IRC spec try to address at least some of these, but as far as I'm aware, they aren't very widely supported
  - dewey 3y ago
    IRC is also just not ready for a multiple device lifestyle. People expect to log in and have the same stats across devices, that’s very hard to do with IRC.
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    Technology improved, people got Features and Devices, they wanted to use their Features and Devices, and they switched to the service that gave them their Features on their Devices. There's no mystery. The average person doesn't care about federation or an open protocol or whatever. They probably don't even understand those things and they don't want to understand them. They just want to chat with their friends and send emojis and not get upset that things don't work. IRC, by all accounts, fails to do—out of the box—all of those things (well).
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  Me too. Judging by Discord's tendencies toward speech policing and censorship there will be plenty of groups staying out of it though. A large part of the previous subculture will probably be banned promptly on Discord.
  - antibasilisk 3y ago
sega_sai 3y ago
There is a very good Lawfare podcast with the Bellingcat investigator on that https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-rid-and-toler-latest-megaleak https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-rid-and-toler-la... which goes into more details on this.
baryphonic 3y ago
Notwithstanding the New York Times calling 4chan far-right and blatantly editorializing (seriously, if this is a news piece, why is there commentary about Discord's moderation policy?), I am most interested in whether the leaks are true. Has the White House been grossly over-representing Ukraine's chances? Will Ukraine be unable to protect their airspace after late May?
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  Leaks are different from hacks in that they are released secretly Vs stolen. Usually a leak has a purpose. Often it's political, and political messaging particularly about war is propaganda.
  - harry8 3y ago
    The only difference between a leak and hack is whether there was one person trusted with the information knowingly involved in the transfer chain to publication or not. We don't have different words as to motives of those doing the leaking. A leak can be to support the status quo or hostile to it or anything else besides.
- TeeMassive 3y ago
  During the invasion Crimea Obama refused to send military support because it would just help create a long war of attrition, which Russia has more than enough the ressource to sustain, with the same outcome.
- uni_rule 3y ago
  Well 4chan sure as hell isn't full of Marxist college students quoting theory at each other nor is it milquetoast CNN-style liberals. It is predominantly right wing (in an edgy 7th grader sort of way) to the point of needing kill files to be legible like the old days of Usenet. At the very least it's not more anarchist leaning like it was 15 years ago.
perryizgr8 3y ago
Wow that was content free. What is the actual info that was leaked?
- pragmar 3y ago
  The notable bit was the killed in action numbers from the conflict: 17k Russian troops, and 70k on the Ukrainian side. Estimates from US and European leaders have been all over the map, some in this neighborhood, but others saying more Russians were KIA than were Ukrainians.
  - ranger207 3y ago
    Those numbers are edited. Someone basically flipped the order of the digits, eg from 17k to 71k Ukrainian KiA. This is easily confirmed by the Russian aircraft losses; Oryx has many more visually confirmed losses than the edited number claims, and by its very nature Oryx's list is an underestimate. https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1644139100407054336?cxt=HHwWgIC-kaDzk9EtAAAA https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1644139100407054336?cxt...
    - pragmar 3y ago
      Thanks for the link, had not realized there was more than one version out there. My numbers definitely appear to be tampered with (judging from the alignment).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
  How can you even tell what actual info was leaked? How can you tell if the info leaked in real? We have entered into a era where the difference between real and fake is almost impossible to distinguish. Deep fakes and LLM's are going to change propoganda forever.
TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
In an article about leaked documents, they sure don't talk alot about the documents that were leaked... Is it some kind of psych-op, LLM going on in the comments? No one's interested or curious about the documents and are spamming the page with 4chan shit?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

94 points by hi5eyes 3y ago

The NYT characterizes 4chan as a far-right message board, which is ridiculous. I mean, if giving the finger to pretty much everything is considered far-right, then what's considered far-left? Fundamentalism?

jterrys 3y ago
It's 2023. The site has been around for 19 years. If they haven't gotten it right by this point, they never will. And its "probably" that way by design.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
> then what's considered far-left 4chan. The most notorious boards feel anarchist and were very anti-globalist long before it was fashionable. But as you implied, 4chan as a whole is not homogenous.
- qtzfz 3y ago
  Anarchism and anti-globalism were far-left values like 20 years ago. Right now the left and far-left give strong "conform" vibes.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I dunno about that. Radical anti capitalist sentiment, for instance, feels far left and anarchist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_anarchism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_anarchism
    - Kamq 3y ago
      That really depends on the reasoning behind it. The far right has a number of anti-capitalist. Usually around capitalism undermining social order and traditional bonds. If we're talking 4chan specifically still, then the idea that capitalism is a jewish plot to... something? (the what varies a lot as far as I can tell) is probably more likely.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    There is a substantial cohort of 'libs' who started calling themselves 'leftists' post-George Floyd, but when probed about their opinions on e.g. means testing, prison abolition, or asked to define even something as basic as Marxism, miss the mark so widely on the fundaments of those ideas that it appears they've labeled themselves without actually contending with certain core concepts that literally define the distinctions between left folks and others. Of course, the boogeymen borne of tribalistic (politico-cultural) battlegrounds mean that those on the broad right look leftward and see people calling themselves 'leftists' dragging the classical left tenets toward strange, centrist-ized, often authoritarian lines and assume without further evidence that this applies to the left generally. I promise you there's still plenty of folks who competently understand the labels they choose to inhabit.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Both “anarchism” and “anti-globalism” (the former largely as a result of fairly recent cooption, the latter inherently in being a label of opposition not specifically tied to the ideological reason for opposition) have both far-left and far-right versions, and that remains the case. Neither is universal on the left or the right, either, because while anarchism in the narrower historical sense is connected to socialism, there are obviously socialisms that are not anarchist (even without going to the extreme of Lenin/Stalin/Mao vanguardist approaches). I disagree that, within the left and far-left, the anarchist or anti-globalist segments have recently retreated. OTOH, in the United States, the old (peaking around 1990) overlapping center-right neoliberal globalist faction forming the moderate wings of both major parties has faded in the Republican Party, leading the remaining segment of it – which is the dominant faction of the Democratic Party – to be called “left” (and sometimes “far left”) by Republican partisans.
pcwalton 3y ago
The board specifically set aside for politics on 4chan is probably the most popular neo-Nazi discussion forum on the internet. "Far-right" is a completely fair description of the political leanings of that site.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  But they have never been "far right" in the way that the traditional racial supremacy kind of neo nazis are. If anything, they are good evidence for horseshoe theory, or perhaps invalidity of the left-right scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    /pol/ most certainly is that way. I've been on 4chan for more than 15 years and I research far right extremism professionally. /pol/ isn't the most right wing or extreme place on the internet, but claiming it's not like 'traditional racial supremacy [..] neo-nazis' is nonsense, that's 20-25% of /pol/ threads.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      Touche, I am not a /pol/ regular. Glimpses of /b/ is about as far as I got, and the Nazism seemed more like trolling and baiting on the surface.
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      > I research far right extremism professionally Please elaborate. This is a common claim among "disinformation experts," when what they really mean is they occasionally browse /pol/ while telling themselves it's an academic exercise and they're obviously better than everyone posting on that "cesspool." If reading /pol/ for hours a day is enough to say you "research far right extremism professionally," then I'd posit that every one of the most active users of /pol/ is more of an expert on it than any pseudo-intellectual making a spurious claim to authority based on their "professional expertise." By that metric, nearly every one of your "research subjects" is more of an expert than you, so if we want a fair assessment of 4chan, we should probably ask someone who uses it genuinely rather than sanctimoniously.
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
[flagged]
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  Nazis use the internet. You use the internet. Therefore, you're a nazi.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
    Going back to the dinner analogy, you've stretched going to dinner with someone to happening to be in the same restaurant as that someone. It's not the same kind of association at all.
    - izzydata 3y ago
      The entire website is closer to the entire restaurant in this analogy. Posting in the same threads might be similar to sitting at the same table.
  - DiabloD3 3y ago
    That is a false equivalence though. ex: "Nazis eat food, you eat food, therefore you're a Nazi." Doing something that all people do and are expected to do, on either side of the conflict, does not actually make a difference. Being a complete and utter jackass makes the difference.
- ekam 3y ago
  Guilt by association makes no sense… would this also apply to eg, communists?
  - Entinel 3y ago
    Communist don't want to see the eradication of a single race of people so no I don't think it would.
    - 3y ago
rsav 3y ago
[flagged]
SpaceManNabs 3y ago
/b/, /vg/, /v/, /pol/ and sometimes /g/ all have strong alt right representation. (actually /g/ is still much more libertarian but you get some bleed in here and there). Even /sci/ has changed. You have race IQ intelligence threads all the time compared to 2011. Instead of the daily Putnam problem thread, you get that garbage. NYT is pretty on the money here. If this were 2010, I'd disagree with them, but not nowadays. disclaimer of my own bias: I stopped using 4chan in 2012 because of how much of an alt right mess it became after /r9k/. Didn't have the words to describe it back then. I remember people making endless Dragon Age memes in the pinned thread in /v/ in response to the mass shooting by a particular Anders in 2011. They were celebrating it, and it was the most active live thread on the site in that moment.
- YarickR2 3y ago
  Please define alt right, in your own words. It seems everyone claiming 4chan is right, far right, or alt right, means something rather different
  - SpaceManNabs 3y ago
    I am not going to play games with semantics when we can look at the state of the site now compared to before 2011. Do you think that /pol/ is anything but some bastardization of right wing principles?
  - alternatetwo 3y ago
    Alt right is a progranda term by neo nazis for neo nazis, so they don't sound like actual neo nazis. Stop using the term alt right. Alt right means neo nazi. Nothing else.
    - pnt12 3y ago
      Not every racist is a neo nazi, not every leftist is a stalinist. Lumping them together is a cheap tactic to aggravate people, which I think it's dishonest and not very effective.
netsharc 3y ago
My guess is (since I don't claim to be a 4chan expert), in the beginning, 4chan users were just being edgy by being trolls and being for the choices that would lead to chaos (by being not politically correct, by supporting Donald Trump), but this attracted many genuine right-wingers, and if they do bother to hang out there, that would mean 4chan has become a far-right message board.
- antibasilisk 3y ago
  The uptick in unironic racism mostly happened when stormfront discovered 4chan.
bearjaws 3y ago
I mean, giving the finger to everything is a pretty common trope amongst the far right. Everyone has their uncle or cousin that says "I am not racist I just hate everyone equally"... It's also a GOP playbook to destroy or disrupt social services and education to then say "look how bad everything is"...
vkou 3y ago
Saying 4chan isn't a far-right message board is like saying HN isn't a tech forum, and citing the existence of non-tech threads to support that argument.
_rmhc 3y ago
The Something Awful forums are probably the most virulently far left "major" online space at present. They mostly keep the communism will win white genocide now stuff behind the paywall though.

beebmam 3y ago

I think the accusation that 4chan is a far-right message board is accurate, and I believe that accusation can be supported by showing that 4chan's explicitly stated rules can be used to plausibly deny this accusation, while demonstrating that they're are not enforced (or selectively enforced). 4chan's Rule 3: "You will not post any of the following outside of /b/: Troll posts, Racism, Anthropomorphic ("furry") pornography, Grotesque ("guro") images..." These rules are constantly being violated across many of the boards, and moderators rarely take action on some of the boards when posts are reported unless they explicitly violate US law. I've seen so many threads get to 400+ replies and fall off the boards, threads that blatantly violate these rules. The period of time after the 2020 election was brutal, an enormous amount of violent and racist content was not removed. Rules are often even selectively enforced, sculpting narratives that moderator cliques decide on (see /pol/ for example). At some point, it's worthwhile to ask "who benefits?" from these rules not being enforced. The kind of content that doesn't get moderated is strictly far-right stuff.

tr1ggered 3y ago
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andrewclunn 3y ago
Anthropomorphic furry porn is right wing now? I think there are some people for whom "offensive to me," "offensive to others, and "right wing" are equivalent terms. All your post does is prove that you fall into that category. Live Leak death videos and racist jokes are no more "right wing" than pedophilia is "left wing" (which is to say that it isn't). Now some people break down racism in some weird way where bigotry towards Africans or Hispanics is "right wing" and bigotry toward Caucasians and Asians is "left wing," but those people are laughable in their tribalistic thinking and weird politicization of everything.
- deleted 3y ago
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- flangola7 3y ago
  Have you even been on 4chan before? This isn't some nuanced "what actually is systemic bigotry?" question. "Ni**s and tra**s should all be burned alive and there should be bounties that pay for it" is not a subtle message. Yet it is a sentiment that is visible (and often verbatim) in every thread, and which receives supportive replies.

notjulianjaynes 3y ago

>"Losers. That’s who the U.S. government really has to fear.” The New York Times has published, by my count, 15 articles on this leak in the past 7 days.

Kenji 3y ago
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colpabar 3y ago
Could you explain what you’re implying because I don’t get it
- bakugo 3y ago
  I think the implication here is that, if you write 15 articles in 1 week about people you claim are "losers", maybe you're the loser.
- notjulianjaynes 3y ago
  It strikes me as somewhat petty that the Times apparently considers the information in the leak important enough to cover so thoroughly, yet they think so little of the source of that information that they'll interview a 20 year old comedy vlogger (haven't watched channel) in the UK to get some quotes painting that source as some sort of right wing extremist group. Maybe they are, but I did not see evidence of such laid out in this article. >But the unfiltered, edgy banter in the wow_mao server, which is called the End of Wow Mao Zone, and in many other servers like it, can sometimes veer into darker territory. Those servers are sometimes described as the less venomous cousins of 4chan, the far-right anonymous message board known for sharing conspiracy theories and popularizing QAnon. Many 4chan users split their time between Discord and 4chan, sharing digital memes and chatting with friends. Emphasis added.
plaguepilled 3y ago
>"Losers. That’s who the U.S. government really has to fear.” So... they fear NYT? Does this count as a publication threatening the government?

Apocryphon 3y ago

Is Discord PR active in this thread? TFA centers on that platform, with 4chan being mentioned only a handful of times, yet this thread so far is completely focused on 4chan.

dmreedy 3y ago
I think more likely there are just a lot of 4chan users on this site. And some subset of those take perceived attacks like these quite personally.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  I was joking- I think it's just HN being really good at jumping down the wrong rabbit holes and bike-shedding ad nauseam, while completely missing the point of an OP.
  - yodon 3y ago
    >Is Discord PR active in this thread? ... >I was joking This might be a good opportunity to read up again on Poe's law[0]. It pretty much always applies when one tries to make jokes like this on the web. Sarcasm and irony only work as intended when talking with people who know you personally or with people who assume they know your viewpoints. If people don't have reason to believe they know your viewpoint, they hear your sarcasm as literal (and frequently think poorly of you, as a result). [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
    - plaguepilled 3y ago
      Poe's law is hot garbage though. If someone misses context because they're not privy to sarcasm, that isn't automatically the speaker's fault.
      - kajaktum 3y ago
        Sarcasm doesn’t work with text based medium. Is this sarcasm?

neonate 3y ago

https://archive.ph/Oia1n https://archive.ph/Oia1n http://web.archive.org/web/20230412204156/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/business/discord-leaked-military-documents.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230412204156/https://www.nytime...

diamondfist25 3y ago

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v0idzer0 3y ago

NYT gets so much mileage out of “researchers say” and “experts say” yet they never cite anyone

ctvo 3y ago
> Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say. Immediately following this paragraph is a quote from a researcher: > “If you’re a young man with no prospects hanging out on 4chan, you’re definitely on some Discords and probably some pretty dark Discords,” said Dale Beran, a lecturer at Morgan State University and the author of “It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.”
- mc32 3y ago
  Hmmm this harkens back to “movies influence kids” “music influences kids”, video games influence kids” etc that many people argued in order to censor aspects of music, movies and video games.
- sbuttgereit 3y ago
  "Dale Beran - Lecturer/ Animation Coordinator , Screenwriting and Animation" Researcher, perhaps, but seems to not be what his credentials or college role is about. https://www.morgan.edu/screenwriting-and-animation/faculty-and-staff/dale-beran https://www.morgan.edu/screenwriting-and-animation/faculty-a...
  - jjeaff 3y ago
    Whether it's valid or not, authoring a book on a particular subject usually qualifies someone as an expert on a subject. Especially if it is on an esoteric and modern subject like online socializing.
    - latency-guy2 3y ago
      I know of someone who published a book on Golang in 2010. The rating of that book is sitting in the 3s out of 5 stars last I checked 6 years ago. Is he an expert at Go? Not in my most humblest opinion, is the content of the book good? Also a no in my honest, must charitable view. How far did he get with showing people how to program with Go? About as far as you'd get in 2 hours on the golang docs even considering a very poorly skilled college student doing the exercises. There's maybe 170 pages in the book. I'm almost certain the book has not reached even 200 sales at the highest. Is he really considered an expert to you, solely because of the publishing of a book? Here it is by the way: https://www.amazon.com/Go-Programming-John-P-Baugh/dp/1453636676 https://www.amazon.com/Go-Programming-John-P-Baugh/dp/145363... I know that's not necessarily your view, but this is the standard we are working with

guardiangod 3y ago

I am sad that Discord has replaced IRC as the chatroom of the internet's subculture.

Minor49er 3y ago
IRC lacks widespread support for things like roles, reactions, avatars, threads, showing chat history from before someone enters a channel, search history, and having video and voice chat without piggybacking on top of DCC. There also aren't sync issues within Discord that cause things like netsplits which are somewhat common on IRC I know some newer versions of the IRC spec try to address at least some of these, but as far as I'm aware, they aren't very widely supported
- dewey 3y ago
  IRC is also just not ready for a multiple device lifestyle. People expect to log in and have the same stats across devices, that’s very hard to do with IRC.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  Technology improved, people got Features and Devices, they wanted to use their Features and Devices, and they switched to the service that gave them their Features on their Devices. There's no mystery. The average person doesn't care about federation or an open protocol or whatever. They probably don't even understand those things and they don't want to understand them. They just want to chat with their friends and send emojis and not get upset that things don't work. IRC, by all accounts, fails to do—out of the box—all of those things (well).
alwayslikethis 3y ago
Me too. Judging by Discord's tendencies toward speech policing and censorship there will be plenty of groups staying out of it though. A large part of the previous subculture will probably be banned promptly on Discord.
- antibasilisk 3y ago

sega_sai 3y ago

There is a very good Lawfare podcast with the Bellingcat investigator on that https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-rid-and-toler-latest-megaleak https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-rid-and-toler-la... which goes into more details on this.

baryphonic 3y ago

Notwithstanding the New York Times calling 4chan far-right and blatantly editorializing (seriously, if this is a news piece, why is there commentary about Discord's moderation policy?), I am most interested in whether the leaks are true. Has the White House been grossly over-representing Ukraine's chances? Will Ukraine be unable to protect their airspace after late May?

thinkingemote 3y ago
Leaks are different from hacks in that they are released secretly Vs stolen. Usually a leak has a purpose. Often it's political, and political messaging particularly about war is propaganda.
- harry8 3y ago
  The only difference between a leak and hack is whether there was one person trusted with the information knowingly involved in the transfer chain to publication or not. We don't have different words as to motives of those doing the leaking. A leak can be to support the status quo or hostile to it or anything else besides.
TeeMassive 3y ago
During the invasion Crimea Obama refused to send military support because it would just help create a long war of attrition, which Russia has more than enough the ressource to sustain, with the same outcome.
uni_rule 3y ago
Well 4chan sure as hell isn't full of Marxist college students quoting theory at each other nor is it milquetoast CNN-style liberals. It is predominantly right wing (in an edgy 7th grader sort of way) to the point of needing kill files to be legible like the old days of Usenet. At the very least it's not more anarchist leaning like it was 15 years ago.

perryizgr8 3y ago

Wow that was content free. What is the actual info that was leaked?

pragmar 3y ago
The notable bit was the killed in action numbers from the conflict: 17k Russian troops, and 70k on the Ukrainian side. Estimates from US and European leaders have been all over the map, some in this neighborhood, but others saying more Russians were KIA than were Ukrainians.
- ranger207 3y ago
  Those numbers are edited. Someone basically flipped the order of the digits, eg from 17k to 71k Ukrainian KiA. This is easily confirmed by the Russian aircraft losses; Oryx has many more visually confirmed losses than the edited number claims, and by its very nature Oryx's list is an underestimate. https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1644139100407054336?cxt=HHwWgIC-kaDzk9EtAAAA https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1644139100407054336?cxt...
  - pragmar 3y ago
    Thanks for the link, had not realized there was more than one version out there. My numbers definitely appear to be tampered with (judging from the alignment).
- deleted 3y ago
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TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
How can you even tell what actual info was leaked? How can you tell if the info leaked in real? We have entered into a era where the difference between real and fake is almost impossible to distinguish. Deep fakes and LLM's are going to change propoganda forever.

TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago

In an article about leaked documents, they sure don't talk alot about the documents that were leaked... Is it some kind of psych-op, LLM going on in the comments? No one's interested or curious about the documents and are spamming the page with 4chan shit?

deleted 3y ago
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