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Comment by 781 | Hacker News Reader

Leading media, New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post are calling for immediate and drastic action against 8chan.

It's only a matter of time until it will be shutdown.

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It's pretty surreal to see such publications that sold the war in Middle East all those years disavow anti-Islamic terror, are they finally admitting they were wrong all those years? Are they aware that perhaps their legitimization of the foreign occupation and demonization of the Muslim world might make them complicit in the ideology and subsequent actions of this shooter?

The shooter's manifesto was mostly ranting about demographic displacement, which those newspapers seldom cover. While you can certainly blame the publications for parroting US government talking points and helping sell the war, I don't think you can pin this particular shooting on them.

Please provide links to where these publications demand drastic action against 8chan.

I've seen nothing of the sort.

The closest I can find is this WP perspective urging giants like Facebook and Youtube to "deal with the crisis that they have helped create".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/social-media-...

Expect other sites to be caught up in the dragnet. I'm sure politicians across the globe all have laundry lists of "naughty sites" that they'd love to see shut down, and now they were given a great reason to go do it. We've seen this played out before: patiently wait for a horrific event to happen, then push the ready-to-go agenda through while people are grieving.

I'm sure they'll start by shutting down the biggest .. YouTube?

> Leading media... are calling for immediate and drastic action against 8chan.

Sources?

As someone who browses 8chan I'd rather the entire site doesn't take the hit, since not the entire site partakes in this. It's only /pol/ that needs to be removed.

8ch is jim's ego project now, it'll continue to exist as long as it amuses him or is regulated out of existence. removing /pol/ wont remove /pol/ users. however, removing places like /pol/ or /baph/ would fundamentally kill 8ch as it would no longer be a free speech site. nor would such a move appease the disingenuous opportunists who use tragedies like this for their own personal gain.

Modern 8ch has been overrun by /pol/, they've been a consistent problem that's only gotten worse. 8ch already isn't a free speech site, /pol/ will ban you for even questioning their rhetoric. Sure you can create a new board, but almost no one ever browses those except to stash CP when they eventually get abandoned.

Removing /pol/ would certainly remove /pol/ users, they would need to find another place and it takes time for these sorts of communities to regroup.

New Zealand simply doesn't have the censorship infrastructure in place to do that.

We are ineffectively blocking websites through very crude technical means that are not designed for censorship.

I am just saying you are requesting something that has deeper implications... My opinions on censorship are not relevant to that.

Crude technical means are often enough to get the brunt of it out of the way, just look at what happened to /r/incels which at its height had 42000 users, the place the ones that cared enough moved to has only 9155, the rest of them by and large have successfully been deplatformed.

I used to be very much on the side of 'free speech', but it's become increasingly clear to me that deplatforming and censoring, while indeed unpleasant, is effective and necessary.

Thank god.

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