Who Owns 4chan?
wired.com
wired.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, they weren't.
Wired was founded in the mid-1990s. (First issue was March/April '93).
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.