I 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.
It 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/
Not 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?
The 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?
There 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
It 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.
AFAIK the conspiracy theory memes have a far and wide reaching, even internationally, even if the people receiving, translating and forwarding them have no idea where they originated. With that said most young people I know is familiar with what QAnon means, and I'm not even in the US.
Much of the QAnon mythology incorporated conspiracy theories and beliefs that already existed within the right-wing and Evangelical communities. I think it tapped into the populist zeitgeist of Trump's base - which was already deeply conspiratorial - and crystallized all of those inchoate fears into a single narrative, promising vindication, redemption and cleansing. I don't think it can be separated from the greater global right-wing populist shift, or the phenomenon of "post-truth" reality, whereby people tend to live in self-reinforcing bubbles of subjective reality manufactured by news and social media, rejecting the mainstream almost by reflex.
I doubt most people who fall into QAnon know what 4chan is or even care. It was a parody that was so on point, the people it was mocking just saw it as a revelation.
It's a joke to 4chan et al but not the people who fell down that rabbit hole. I don't know how many people actually believe in it, but based on watching protests and other political activity over the last few years, it's substantial.
I've been to a lot of protests of all types [to be clear, as an observer, not a participant], including far right and antivax protests where many QAnon types were present, and I can say without any doubt that most of the people involved are sincere.
I also spent an inordinate amount of time watching protest/political live streams in 2020 and 2021, which further reinforces this.
when it just started taking off Facebook was suggesting multiple qanon groups for me to join, each with tens of thousands of members. I think it was successful because it shed the context it was borne out of, no one on facebook knew about FBIAnon
I think it has something to do with the adoption of the meme beyond channer culture. To anyone using the site, it's obvious that some random tripcode user holds no more credibility than an anonymous one.
But perhaps baseless, pseudo-anonymous allegations are given an extra flair of "mysteriousness" and "intrigue" to those who are unfamiliar with the site. The media plays into this: recall the "hackers on steroids" incident.
Susceptibility is a big factor too. Seeing something mysterious on the internet is one thing, but believing in something that has no factual or verifiable basis is quite another.
So a followup question is, why are so many people susceptible? It seems to have something to with making sense of the world when you feel like you're being lied to all the time, and I totally get that part, but I don't get how these conspiracy theories help with that.
It would be one thing if it was just a handful of people, because there's always a few people who will believe anything, but it's a lot more than just a few in this case.
It was really strange to watch my family fall into QAnon. I've been on the internet since the mid 90s. I remember when 4chan came along, I remember it being just a silly place. I remember when Anonymous started there too. But when my family got hooked it was weird they had been watching Glenn Beck and Alex Jones and other rightwing figures. Then I remember my step-mom telling me she wanted to join Anonymous and become the biggest informant ever. I was taken aback. I didn't understand where the conjunction between right-wing media consumption and a quasi-hacker group intersected. This was back in 2014 mind you. I took her down to my computer and I showed her 4chan and a few other places and asked her is this what she was talking about when talking about Anonymous. She had no idea what I was talking about. She lost her mind, quite literally, a little bit later. My dad filed for divorce and they separated. But he continued on with the Q shit. I don't talk to him anymore, he's a fucking stranger to me these days.
> The 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.
We live in an era where people feel free to believe whatever they want to believe, and apparently QAnon provided a framework for some of those desired beliefs.
American society is headed towards a crack-up, and no solution is forthcoming from any current political faction, because that would require giving ground for the greater good.
> The thing I don't get still is how QAnon became so big.
Same as any other conspiracy theory really:
> Q, the anonymous internet poster behind the movement, who claims to be a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, releases cryptic breadcrumbs known as “drops” online that followers then decipher. Drops are said to explain or predict developments in the supposed war between President Trump and the alleged deep-state pedophiles. Participating in what feels like an exclusive intelligence circle can satisfy the human need for uniqueness, psychologists’ research has shown, prompting a desire to continue participating (Lantian, A., et al., Social Psychology, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2017).
> People also turn to conspiracy theories when important psychological needs aren’t being met, says Douglas. Her research shows that such narratives can fulfill our need for certainty and security, for instance, when events seem random, and for social belonging (Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 26, No. 6, 2017).
> Those findings help explain why many Americans, including QAnon supporters, have turned to extreme explanations for the COVID-19 pandemic. Survey data collected by psychologist Daniel Romer, PhD, research director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, suggest that nearly a third of U.S. adults think the coronavirus is a bioweapon created by the Chinese government (Romer, D. & Jamieson, K.H., Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 263, 2020).
> “Conspiracy theories make people feel as though they have some sort of control over the world,” Romer says. “They can be psychologically reassuring, especially in uncertain times.”
> The reasons why people endorse or believe in conspiracy theories are diverse. Reported individual effects are mostly small and treated in isolation. Conspiracies appear to appeal to those who feel disconnected from society, who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their circumstances, who possess a subjective worldview that includes unusual beliefs, experiences and thoughts, and do not feel in control of their life (c.f. Rose, 2017). The endorsement of them challenges existing power structures in society (Imhoff and Bruder, 2014). Furthermore, those with higher levels of clinically relevant traits such as paranoid thought and schizotypy endorse them. Conceptually, for a comprehensive understanding of the causes of conspiracy beliefs, interaction of predictors should be investigated. Anomia, for example, combines elements of social-dominance orientation, powerlessness, need for cognitive closure, and distrust (Lamberty et al., 2018), yet variables are often treated independently.
There was probably bound to be a "big" one at some point that hooked a lot of people eventually, and it may be just a coïncidence that it was QAnon: nothing particular about it, just 'good timing'.
No matter what stupid theory you believe in, you can still be in QAnon and not be judged.
Bill Gates pushing 5G chips in the COVID vaccine? Come in.
Trump is still president and will take over again Really Soon? Yep, we got you.
George Soros something something conspiracy? You're welcome.
I 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?
> An attacker named Wu Huanming (吴环明), 48, killed seven children and two adults and injured 11 other persons with a cleaver at a kindergarten in Hanzhong, Shaanxi on May 12, 2010;[8] early reports were removed from the internet in China, for fear that mass coverage of such violence could provoke copycat attacks.
That's just an example, there are many more listed.
> A country of a billion people hasn't had one yet this year, and had just one last year.
Yeah, probably because they've taken sensible steps to control the media coverage around these kinds of crimes to prevent copycats. Also the wide and deep social media monitoring is probably quite helpful in preventing socially destructive communities like 4chan from forming and getting out of control. China has always had really strict gun control. If we really want to put a stop to these kinds of attacks, we really need to go all in to destroy the social contagion that's the root cause.
You're willing to believe that China hides the true extent of its problem. I can't argue with you there, because such a conspiracy theory is not easily falsifiable.
So compare America to other the liberal democracies in the G8. It will remain an aberration and horrific outlier.
> You're willing to believe that China hides the true extent of its problem. I can't argue with you there, because such a conspiracy theory is not easily falsifiable.
Maybe. I was more thinking along the lines that they don't blast the idea that attacking a school is something you can do into everyone's faces. It's not very good situation that every susceptible person in America is very familiar with the idea that attacking a school is an option they have.
Media safety is another thing we need to be talking about, so all effective actions can be taken to deal with this problem. This wall-to-wall publicity will likely cause more gruesome deaths, and probably already has.
> The investigators applied a mathematical model and found that shootings that resulted in at least four deaths launched a period of contagion, marked by a heightened likelihood of more bloodshed, lasting an average of 13 days.
If you seriously believe that 4chan is in any way responsible here, you didn't think too hard about the causes. People with no place elsewhere might land there, perhaps it is even a pressure valve for people to rant to. But it is certainly not the source of these deeds. 4chan has a more international community than most comparable English speaking social media sites and yet these problems seem to concentrate in certain places.
Well, 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.
I think you're misattributing the medium to the.. dunno, zeitgeist? of communications.
As the servers/communities are so closed off (relatively, compared to other things) I don't think the comparison to reddit stands. I'm on several gaming discords and even they're varying so much, the only overlap is general memes. I've not stumbled over any sort of discord-'in'-language. On reddit you have upvotes or copypastas or cake days or whatever, but as others have said, Discord is more like email - not even like IRC with some of its oddities.
I would disagree, perhaps not a community but definitely a niche or sub genre. I have a discord I use at work, and there are definitely zero people using 4chan for work.
No, 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.
Whew, 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”.
Discord 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.
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/
I 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?
Are 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.
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.
Consider 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.
> Are 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.
We need to attack this problem from all angles. That includes both gun safety laws and media safety laws. The mentally ill should not be regularly be reminded of the idea that attacking schoolchildren is something they can do.
That's a slogan, not a solution. You talk like that would stop school attacks, when it would not. There have been many mass-casually school attacks with knives.
If we really want to solve this problem, strict and comprehensive media safety laws will need to be part of the solution.
What are the stats on mass knife attacks? Doubtful they cause as much death as shootings.
If guns are illegal it's far easier to rid the country of them instead of a complex mesh of laws that vary by state, county, city, township. Fewer guns certainly makes accidents, impulsive suicide and manslaughter much less likely.
Given that it's already known that the FBI had both shooters on their radar, combined with the behavior of those cops in Texas, it's kind of hard not to land on complicity, to be honest.
There'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.
>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.
It'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/
Not 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.
I 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.
Journalists 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.
There 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
This 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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadNo, they weren't.
Wired was founded in the mid-1990s. (First issue was March/April '93).
Wasn't QAnon on 8kun, not 4chan?
I doubt most people who fall into QAnon know what 4chan is or even care. It was a parody that was so on point, the people it was mocking just saw it as a revelation.
I’m not convinced it isn’t just performance art or clever meta-commentary or a joke for the in-person protestors as well.
I also spent an inordinate amount of time watching protest/political live streams in 2020 and 2021, which further reinforces this.
"Performance art or clever meta-commentary or a joke" has a way of mutating into sincere belief if the content gets at all popular.
But perhaps baseless, pseudo-anonymous allegations are given an extra flair of "mysteriousness" and "intrigue" to those who are unfamiliar with the site. The media plays into this: recall the "hackers on steroids" incident.
So a followup question is, why are so many people susceptible? It seems to have something to with making sense of the world when you feel like you're being lied to all the time, and I totally get that part, but I don't get how these conspiracy theories help with that.
It would be one thing if it was just a handful of people, because there's always a few people who will believe anything, but it's a lot more than just a few in this case.
We live in an era where people feel free to believe whatever they want to believe, and apparently QAnon provided a framework for some of those desired beliefs.
American society is headed towards a crack-up, and no solution is forthcoming from any current political faction, because that would require giving ground for the greater good.
Same as any other conspiracy theory really:
> Q, the anonymous internet poster behind the movement, who claims to be a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, releases cryptic breadcrumbs known as “drops” online that followers then decipher. Drops are said to explain or predict developments in the supposed war between President Trump and the alleged deep-state pedophiles. Participating in what feels like an exclusive intelligence circle can satisfy the human need for uniqueness, psychologists’ research has shown, prompting a desire to continue participating (Lantian, A., et al., Social Psychology, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2017).
> People also turn to conspiracy theories when important psychological needs aren’t being met, says Douglas. Her research shows that such narratives can fulfill our need for certainty and security, for instance, when events seem random, and for social belonging (Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 26, No. 6, 2017).
> Those findings help explain why many Americans, including QAnon supporters, have turned to extreme explanations for the COVID-19 pandemic. Survey data collected by psychologist Daniel Romer, PhD, research director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, suggest that nearly a third of U.S. adults think the coronavirus is a bioweapon created by the Chinese government (Romer, D. & Jamieson, K.H., Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 263, 2020).
> “Conspiracy theories make people feel as though they have some sort of control over the world,” Romer says. “They can be psychologically reassuring, especially in uncertain times.”
* https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2020/conspiracy-theories
> The reasons why people endorse or believe in conspiracy theories are diverse. Reported individual effects are mostly small and treated in isolation. Conspiracies appear to appeal to those who feel disconnected from society, who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their circumstances, who possess a subjective worldview that includes unusual beliefs, experiences and thoughts, and do not feel in control of their life (c.f. Rose, 2017). The endorsement of them challenges existing power structures in society (Imhoff and Bruder, 2014). Furthermore, those with higher levels of clinically relevant traits such as paranoid thought and schizotypy endorse them. Conceptually, for a comprehensive understanding of the causes of conspiracy beliefs, interaction of predictors should be investigated. Anomia, for example, combines elements of social-dominance orientation, powerlessness, need for cognitive closure, and distrust (Lamberty et al., 2018), yet variables are often treated independently.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0020...
There was probably bound to be a "big" one at some point that hooked a lot of people eventually, and it may be just a coïncidence that it was QAnon: nothing particular about it, just 'good timing'.
No matter what stupid theory you believe in, you can still be in QAnon and not be judged.
Bill Gates pushing 5G chips in the COVID vaccine? Come in. Trump is still president and will take over again Really Soon? Yep, we got you. George Soros something something conspiracy? You're welcome.
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?
There's also accusations that the Buffalo and Austin shooters were both members of the same discord server.
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/6th-street-mass-shooting...
/s.... I hope
The most important question Americans should be asking is why the USA is the only country in the G8 where this is normal.
This doesn't happen regularly elsewhere. It's not Discord. It's not 4Chan. It's not any other social network.
It's the USA. It's the culture of America.
For your information, school attacks aren't exclusive to America, and can be quite a regular occurrence elsewhere, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China
> An attacker named Wu Huanming (吴环明), 48, killed seven children and two adults and injured 11 other persons with a cleaver at a kindergarten in Hanzhong, Shaanxi on May 12, 2010;[8] early reports were removed from the internet in China, for fear that mass coverage of such violence could provoke copycat attacks.
That's just an example, there are many more listed.
The USA has had at least 22 this year.
It's not comparable. It's not equivocal. It's not worth even considering if there's similarities.
The USA is broken, it's broken unlike anywhere else, and it's a cultural problem.
Yeah, probably because they've taken sensible steps to control the media coverage around these kinds of crimes to prevent copycats. Also the wide and deep social media monitoring is probably quite helpful in preventing socially destructive communities like 4chan from forming and getting out of control. China has always had really strict gun control. If we really want to put a stop to these kinds of attacks, we really need to go all in to destroy the social contagion that's the root cause.
So compare America to other the liberal democracies in the G8. It will remain an aberration and horrific outlier.
Maybe. I was more thinking along the lines that they don't blast the idea that attacking a school is something you can do into everyone's faces. It's not very good situation that every susceptible person in America is very familiar with the idea that attacking a school is an option they have.
Media safety is another thing we need to be talking about, so all effective actions can be taken to deal with this problem. This wall-to-wall publicity will likely cause more gruesome deaths, and probably already has.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-ar...:
> The investigators applied a mathematical model and found that shootings that resulted in at least four deaths launched a period of contagion, marked by a heightened likelihood of more bloodshed, lasting an average of 13 days.
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.
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.
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.
I think you're misattributing the medium to the.. dunno, zeitgeist? of communications.
As the servers/communities are so closed off (relatively, compared to other things) I don't think the comparison to reddit stands. I'm on several gaming discords and even they're varying so much, the only overlap is general memes. I've not stumbled over any sort of discord-'in'-language. On reddit you have upvotes or copypastas or cake days or whatever, but as others have said, Discord is more like email - not even like IRC with some of its oddities.
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.
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.
However, what you described does not seem to be a “furry version of child porn”.
You may want to engage with that idea, but as for me, fuck no, fucking never and fuck anyone who stands for it.
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.
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/
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.
Or at least until we can predict mental breakdows and crimes of passion.
We need to attack this problem from all angles. That includes both gun safety laws and media safety laws. The mentally ill should not be regularly be reminded of the idea that attacking schoolchildren is something they can do.
If we really want to solve this problem, strict and comprehensive media safety laws will need to be part of the solution.
If guns are illegal it's far easier to rid the country of them instead of a complex mesh of laws that vary by state, county, city, township. Fewer guns certainly makes accidents, impulsive suicide and manslaughter much less likely.
More incidents = more mandate = more budget.
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.
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.
I really doubt that this japanese toy company is the one pulling the strings behind these terrorist attacks.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.