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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,

by mannyv 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
[flagged]
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  Nazis use the internet. You use the internet. Therefore, you're a nazi.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Guilt by association makes no sense… would this also apply to eg, communists?
  - Entinel 4y ago
    Communist don't want to see the eradication of a single race of people so no I don't think it would.
    - 4y ago
rsav 4y ago
[flagged]
SpaceManNabs 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  The uptick in unironic racism mostly happened when stormfront discovered 4chan.
bearjaws 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.

by mannyv 4y ago

jterrys 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

[flagged]

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Nazis use the internet. You use the internet. Therefore, you're a nazi.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Guilt by association makes no sense… would this also apply to eg, communists?
- Entinel 4y ago
  Communist don't want to see the eradication of a single race of people so no I don't think it would.
  - 4y ago

rsav 4y ago

[flagged]

SpaceManNabs 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
The uptick in unironic racism mostly happened when stormfront discovered 4chan.

bearjaws 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.