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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about 8chan but when it comes to 4chan, there's a certain sport in what people comment in threads. There's countless threads of people claiming to be planning something awful (terrorism, suicide, robbery, eating Taco Bell, etc.) And in the comments you'll see people say all kinds of things, that if taken at face value, are pretty horrible (and maybe even criminal conspiracy.)

But the crux is that these people are not serious (though I'm sure some are), they're just saying it for the sport of calling the bluff of anonymous people they perceive as trolls or brooding teens.

It's like the scene in Futurama where Hermes is threatening to jump off a building to his death and Bender says, "Do a flip!"

This doesn't make it right. And doesn't absolve them of the legal hot water they'd find themselves in. But I hope these individuals, if charged with a crime, get lawyers who will vigorously defend this point.

Edit: I want to re-state that I emphatically do not hold any opinions on this topic. I'm just trying to share a bit about what these image boards can be like.

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I agree thoroughly with this prudent assessment. One thing I'd like to add is that, after far too much of my life spent on 4chan, I believe the line between a total joke and an expression of a sincere sentiment is much blurrier even than it seems. It's much more subtle than a crowd of irreverent kidders dotted with occasional cold blooded misanthropes.

It’s fundamentally the long-tail problem coupled with the low bandwidth nature of message boards. In real life, pretty much everyone you meet is kidding, and the whackos usually send many additional red flags. On 4chan, you collect the more extreme humor, plus the nuts, minus the additional information that you would use to distinguish them in real life.

The internet has in some ways damaged my sense of humor: I’m so much more prone to taking people’s extreme comments at face value than I used to be, because at some point, the Internet has introduced me to a more extreme view genuinely espoused.

So you thoroughly agree with the parent comment, but add the disclaimer that the line between joke and sincerity is blurry.

It is, therefore, unclear, what exactly, your point is.

Do you agree, or disagree? Is it a reasonable assessment to both agree and disagree?

Their lawyers may try, but if their speech is found to have encouraged law-breaking, they can still be convicted and jailed — regardless that they only did it for sport.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

> In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"

I'm not convinced that's the proper reading of that law. FWIW, I'm not a lower just a person with an appreciation of legal questions. I was under the impression that the word 'imminent' implied you had to reasonably be aware those people were going to commit a crime immediately. For example if you're at the front of a mob of angry people and tell them to go loot a shop. I think it would be hard to convincingly say that on a website where 99% of users are joking that posters were inciting crime directly.

Knowing is a very fuzzy bar here. There are/were people who turned to 4chan's /b/ (or other boards) for a very twisted way of guidance. ("Should I kill myself?", "shoot up the school", do "an hero" etc.)

Of course in these cases the Internet Hate Machine's response is the same, but the intensity and effectiveness varies.

Is any single commenter legally responsible? Probably not. And not because they lacked intent, but because 99.9% of these threads are empty trolling. So they could be almost sure knowing nothing would happen.

However, if someone does this for years in the hopes to participate in a thread that is not a dud, well that's of course a different state of mind, but it'd be hard to prove.

"Encouraging law-breaking" and "inciting imminent lawless action and likely to incite it" are different standards. The former sweeps up a large swath of stuff, everything from "Smash capitalism!" on down. The latter is much more constrained, and requires both immediacy and a likelihood of results.

> Edit: I want to re-state that I emphatically do not hold any opinions on this topic.

The most astonishing part of your post is that you consider what you're writing "not an opinion".

Because it is nothing but opinion: it's the theory that thousands of non-antisemites would somehow find pleasure in some sort of "sport" of "pretending" to be vile anti-semites (and racists etc). To repeat this lame excuse is to amplify it, and one wouldn't do so without considering it convincing.

I don't see it is as convincing. I'm just as much not an anti-semite as these people pretend to be, and I see absolutely no mechanism how I would enjoy pretending otherwise.

And even if, somehow, there's a psychological explanation of how spewing insincere hatred provides these people pleasure: would that somehow make this behaviour worthy of public support? Even in the best case of not having any effect on the real world, aren't these people are just stewing in their ("pretend") hatred, wasting whatever time and potential they might have on malevolent low-brow attempts of lame humour?

But of course there are effects on the real world. We've just seen two such tragedies and there have been countless smaller ones. If posters there really are fundamentally of sound mind and not intending to be part of actual harm, can they just continue as before? Doesn't the proof that some people actually do commit violent crimes for fame and lulz somehow destroy this excuse of it all just being an act?

I dunno about now, but back when I browsed on 8chan for a bit the people on there genuinely worried me. There was a board dedicated specifically to doxing and messing with people's lives, there were multiple successful raids on social media websites carried out and the slower pace of the boards meant there was more time for genuine collaboration on things. 4chan people always seemed like they were playing, 8chan people got shit done and many of the things i seen on 8chan actually tended to be more genuine than 4chan.

They really took pride in the hatechan nickname. The place left me with a really bad taste. There was some genuinely nasty people there. Not to mention the fucking pedophiles. So many fucking pedophiles. That place really made me believe there's no hope for people like that.

I'm not sure I agree with your argument. People say a lot of things on these boards "for the lolz", or so they say. I don't know how far the defense gets you. Can swatting be for the lolz?

SWAT-ing has an imminent intent to invoke deleterious action; pretty easy to differentiate from simple speech.

>SWAT-ing has an imminent intent to invoke deleterious action

To be fair, if the incidence of escalation to use of lethal force weren't so prevalent as to be an almost guarantee in the states, the results of SWAT'ing wouldn't even be a problem but more of a nuissance, in the first place, yeah?

In other words, if the resultant actions of the police forces - whether believing they were acting in the interests of public safety or not - weren't so haphazardly deleterious to the public at-large (see the baby with burns because of tear gas thrown in it's crib, as an example), this wouldn't have been a viably dangerous exploitation surface to begin with.

Whilst I can understand that such an action (SWAT'ing) is bad and I am not trying to argue against, dissuade, nor assuage the realities of it, I'm merely trying to point out that the realities of the dangers of it's byproduct solely exist due to societial declination; particularly, in the devaluation of human life, as a whole - which has given carte blance, as it were, to the use of lethal force.

In other words, if lethal force weren't such a foreseeable outcome of SWAT'ing, would it even be something considered deleterious or would it be moreso considered merely a waste of time and resources (which, in and of itself, could have secondary or tertiary effects that are possibly damaging [e.g.: we couldn't respond to 'x' critical situation because we were dealing with 'y' critical situation])?

I like where you're coming from, but it doesn't quite work IMO.

Even having the police just knock on your door might be deleterious enough: The point is the outcome is known, expected, likely, and almost certainly has an observable (by third parties that the person ordinarily associates with) negative effect.

Saying something nasty to someone in an online forum, that if ignored will have no effect, is still markedly different; and is readily differentiable.

A first test might be "if I didn't see the speech would it still have an effect".

> But the crux is that these people are not serious (though I'm sure some are)

Some of us distinctly remember the SiliconInvestor boards from long ago: Some wag started a topic on "I need to sell a kidney". Naturally, few took him seriously.

Turns out he was completely serious, and shortly after was in the news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_O._Barton

The article you link to is of someone who committed suicide and was considered to be a serial killer who executed his family. The article doesn't mention kidney sales, in fact a search of the text for the term "kidney" yields no hits.

Yeah, the Wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but here's a post from a user named "K44B" on SiliconInvestor circa June 2nd, 1999, and then a bunch of discussion a few months later about it being Mark Barton. Doesn't seem to be any clear proof, but at least it's a rumor that dates from the same year as the murders: https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=10909471

(also holy shit is the UX on this forum awful)

The original thread is here: https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=28684

> and then a bunch of discussion a few months later

I remember the board got taken down, but was restored. The shooting was July 29, 1999, and the SIers were already discussing it on the restored thread Aug 11. The thread message at the top changed a few times, but it was pretty clear by Aug 16. https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=10974409

> (also holy shit is the UX on this forum awful)

Hard to believe it was a giant step forward at the time (do we think people will look back at our current websites in 2039 and think they're beautiful?). SI was quite the daytraders place in its day, and this NYT article from Nov that year captures the spirit pretty well: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine... (Mark Barton is also mentioned in that article, which was published pretty close to the absolute peak of the internet bubble. What a time.)

I’ve found that some people are often much more serious than they let on. These “jokes” provide perfect camouflage.

"In every joke is the seed of truth"

Unless you're a professional, jokes mostly just reveal the things going on in your brain

If you have a soft spot for jokes about dumb women or dumb [race] or encouraging kids to harm themselves, well...

8chan really got popular when gamergate people were kicked off of 4chan.

I wish more people realized this is what happens when you attack a group - it gets stronger.

You can hardly describe it as "attacking a group". At the time moot got tired of these people crying 24/7 on /v/, the video games board.

moot has frequently exercised his unique power to ban a topic to prevent a single topic from overrunning a board. And, like the other chans before it, those most invested in that topic have a huge persecution complex and believe they are being censored when they are simple being told to take their soapbox elsewhere.

> have a huge persecution complex and believe they are being censored when they are simple being told to take their soapbox elsewhere.

How many places do you have to get kicked out of before your 'belief' that you're being censored becomes true?

Depends.

How many places does it take for you to get kicked out of before you start thinking to yourself 'maybe I'm the asshole?'.

How many places do you have to be accommodated by people that don't want to hear it?

Replying to both you and the sibling comment:

Feel free to claim that they are assholes, or that people shouldn't have to accommodate them. But that doesn't falsify the claim that they're being censored.

It’s not usually what comes to mind when I think of the word “censored”, but I don’t think it’s unrealistic for a forum or conversation to set ground rules on what’s acceptable speech and isn’t.

I have no desire to listen to people I consider to be assholes. I have no problem censuring those people in my life. There is no right to be an asshole. If you're going to be shitty towards other people, you should not expect a positive reaction from them. You should probably expect to be treated shitty in return. That's basically the golden rule.

Instead there is a bunch of people who believe their shitty behavior is completely justified and righteous and then can't comprehend why people don't want to tolerate them. I have no sympathy for that, whatever language you want to use. Call it censorship if you want, but there is no rule nor law that says shitty behavior has to be tolerated and supported.

And I have no desire to be lied to, yet here we are, censoring a group, and claiming they're not being censored.

When faced with the facts, the question is evaded, attempts are made to change the topic, and every slippery, misleading tactic is used to avoid admission.

I can only conclude such people are wholly uninterested in the truth, and are in fact actively opposed to it.

I think a lot of people tie a certain emotional value / weight / bias / power dynamic / etc to the word censor instead of using it in the cold (valid) way you are here. In other words, a forum that bans speech of type X is setting rules and a government that bans speech of type X is censoring, when truly, both are the same action (censorship) but in completely different contexts.

That might account for why it seems many people on this thread are talking past each other. I don't even think, as you imply, that the person you are replying to is purposely using misleading tactics to avoid admission.

I feel like there's this avoidance of using the word censorship because people think it implies something they don't want to imply about their principles. I could be wrong, but this is just something I've seen play out again and again in discussions about this topic.

For instance, my belief that it is fine and in-fact desirable that private forums censor particular topics, behaviors, etc doesn't necessarily mean that on-principle I am across-the-board "pro-censorship" (whatever that means).

So yes, a group is being censored from a private forum and decided to create their own private forum. I still don't see a problem with that, or "admitting" that is what is happening.

> the person you are replying to is purposely using misleading tactics to avoid admission.

I honestly don't think it's on purpose, nor do I think it's limited to the word/act of censorship. It's a simple, subconscious mechanism of

group I dislike is victim of X (justly or unjustly) --> victimhood grants social power --> downplay/diminish/justify their victimization so they do not gain power

Who, exactly, is the 'we' here? Who, exactly, is 'such people' here?

You're talking in vagaries, and including me in them, and I don't particularly care for that.

Bottom line for me is that if you want to call assholes being excluded from some spaces as 'censorship', you're free to do that, but most people are just going to call that 'assholes getting what they deserve'.

If you want to argue that we should be more accommodating towards assholes, then I really look forward to hearing that argument.

I was talking about the general situation (hence the vagaries).

And I'm not arguing for being more accommodating - I'm arguing for calling a spade a spade. To kick a group of people out of almost every discussion forum, then accuse them of having a "persecution complex", is hypocritical in the extreme.

> If you want to argue that we should be more accommodating towards assholes

Not once did I argue that they should not have been excluded, or anything even remotely similar, yet almost everyone who replies insists on putting words in my mouth. Given how straight-forward my posts were, I'm going to assume this misreading was deliberate.

You're admitting to speaking in vagaries and then also calling your posts straight-forward, and then basically accusing me of trolling you.

Sorry I can't read your mind.

Sorry, I should have said 'generalities'. If you can point at which phrase I used that implied we should be more accommodating towards assholes, perhaps I can learn to express myself more clearly in the future.

In reality, when you attack a group, it gets stronger, unless it retains the same strength, or gets weaker. That’s admittedly a less satisfying rule, but at least it’s true.

Seems... tautological.

It's generally believed that it gets weaker (that's the point of attacking someone - to put them down) and my point is that it tends to get stronger. Attacked groups get together and become more active and motivated. They refine their methods and obtain more high ground from the excesses of the attacking parties.

Gamergaters were not victims, they were denounced and derided because of their doxxing and gang stalking activities on the boards. Their actions led to their removal from 4chan.

The video series about women and videogames started a reaction that included what you describe (doxxing and gang stalking activities) among other things. That led to a reaction that included them being "removed" from 4chan. That led to the more radical people to concentrate on 8chan where don't they get called out for being extremists as much. That led to the case in the OP.

Obviously that's simplified, but I think you can see how the dynamic plays out.

The victims aren't gamergaters or feminists or whatever. It's humanity.

gamergate didn't get 'stronger', gamergate has been over for years, it's just the case that the absurd reaction to the movement created an environment extremely hostile to anything considered 'left' which has now spun out of control.

That's exactly my point.

I agree. People fighting for more inclusion in gaming have gotten a lot stronger since they were attacked by gamergate.

I agree it cuts both ways. Groups in both sides have gotten stronger.

False. Deplatforming works. People afraid of it state that it doesn't work because they're afraid.

You are saying that on a story about 8chan's /pol/ board, which is populated by people who have been deplatformed from other places.

Providing an easily monitorable spot for people that should be on watchlists. They're not exactly taking over the world from there, aren't they?

(keep in mind that every time that they have to move, their numbers are diminished along the way)

I really disagree. Some of these groups barely existed 5-10 years ago and now they are everywhere. Violence cases like the one in the story is going to make them lose a lot of credit with the public, but if the other side escalates as well (see antifa[0]) things may get even worse.

I wish we could all accept our differences more civically, but I don't know how we can make that happen.

[0] I fully expect antifa to get stronger after this.

I don't like this, but violence is a proven remedy against fascism, possibly the best one. Engaging them in good faith debate in the marketplace of ideas isn't.

> But the crux is that these people are not serious (though I'm sure some are),

So which is it? Serious or not? How do we know which is which?

> they're just saying it for the sport of calling the bluff of anonymous people they perceive as trolls or brooding teens.

By what definition of the term is this sport? If anything it's callous, and probably illegal in most jurisdictions.

I don't know about 8chan but

Welp, they're not the same, and /pol/ isn't the same as /b/, or the end of that particular rabbit hole either.

Even /pol/ isn't /pol/. It's a fascinating place in that you can have an openly Neo-Nazi thread right next to the Pro-Zion thread, right next to the Christian thread, followed by the Islam thread. The Yang Gang thread is right next to the MAGA thread which is right next to the Bernies Bros thread.

As much as it is a terrible place, it is also probably the most diverse place in the internet and I sometimes wonder if by exposing each other to diametrically opposed ideas, they temper each other out. I really hope some sort of researcher is archiving it for posterity because I don't think there has ever been an experiment like it.

>I sometimes wonder if by exposing each other to diametrically opposed ideas, they temper each other out.

I mean... you're posting this in a thread about a /pol/ user committing mass murder due to his racist and anti-semitic ideals... and he wasn't even the first to do so.

So... no?

You, can but most of the time you'll have neo-nazi threads next to other neo-nazi threads. Let's look at a sample of the top 50 threads on /pol/ right now (sticky and untitled threads excluded; contains offensive content):

  Dylann Roof's letter to Tucker Carlson
  Who's this Katie Hopkins?
  South Africa
  accept the jews or you will lose
  You're buying cryptocurrency, right anon?
  White men who cant get a white woman should bleach a good looking brown girl.
  Why should we bother?
  DOXX REPORT:ANTIFA MEMBER IN NATIONAL GUARD
  8ch got a search warrant 6 weeks ago (two months)
  Join the marines
  Hungary is BASED
  99 turkroach overflight violations on Greek airspace in a single day.
  /leftypol/ explains why they’re marxists
  Music Video shows White Kids in Cages, Tortured
  /SIG/ Self Improvement General
  Would things be different if America became natsoc instead of Germany? 
  Lesbian NASA Astronaut attack on bus in Camden Town London with her date
  Ontario Anon Goes Shitposting IRL
  homeless anon tip thread
  AJ got framed, again.
  Rockefellers and the Anglo Industrialist Dynasties
  Saint Tarrant pleads NOT guilty!
  RIP Léon Degrelle
  China Cucks to Hong Kong
  Brenton Tarrant Memetic Warfare Thread № XII
  requesting knowledge of the Weimar Republic
  White Victims of Black Crime - Thread #010: Remember lads, subscribe to Pewdiepie
  "Durr Trump is a Jewish sellout!"
  Should the Flyover states just secede From the Union 
  Single Mother Documentary
  New leaked doc shows the USA and trump gets raped by mexican rapists
  The implication of Feminism just being a shittest for society.
  Average jews.
  If We Don't Globally Collapse Within The Next Two Decades, Humanity Is Doomed to Extinction
  Holocaust Is Fake History - 8968
  Paid Shilling Hours
  Druid/pol/ #0032 "Esoteric Operations" edition
  Nick Fuentes sells out to the Jews and tells a Jewish lawyer he denounces anti-semitism
  We lost 4chan
  White males Highest Suicide rates in the Country
  Sol Pais 2nd thread
  Asian hate/redpill thread 2: kill all Asians edition
  Yellow Vests protest for 31st straight week in Paris
  Doctor E.Michael Jones is apparently being blamed for the latest Synagogue Shooting. 
  Was Spanish Caste system the best system
  /ECO GENERAL/ III - Summer Edition
  Trans "rights" are child abuse 
  /pol/ WEBM Thread / MP4 Thread
  /RPG/ Redpill general 
  Antifa wants you to deplatform "fashy farmers"
  On the topic of race and gene editing.

¯\(°_o)/¯

There was this lady that encouraged some weak boy to commit suicide, for the sport as well, and succeeded. It's tricky to find the line between teenage shitposting (hey TSA, my new song is da bomb!) and premediated psychopathic enticement on weak prey to commit something horrible.

The best place to hide bigotry is irony.

With apologies for coarseness:

The Rule of Goats: even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker

—-Popehat

It's all fun and games until someone gets shot.

Even then, it’s still fun and games if you know where to look these days.

Irony stops being ironic and starts being an honest picture of what you are the moment you start doing it out of habit.

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