irvwash

> a quick search for "The only good Republican is a dead Republican" returns a lot of hits for the "[...] dead Democrat" quote and almost none for the search phrase

This is muddled by one particular incident with a video Trump posted. Searching the "democrats" phrase in quotes gives 160,000 results. Searching it with -trump -president gives only 4,000 results, and even then some (maybe most) of those results still seem to be about the incident (but spelling his name as "Dump" for example).

In my experience edgy calls for violence are indeed more common from the right than from the left, but this is a bad way to try to measure it.

I don't know how common it was, but I found this in the first comment section I looked:

> Could it be the Chosenbergs? Although a small group, they seem to control the majority of US record labels, as well as the news outlets, the pharmaceutical companies, the bank institutions, the pornography industry, the entertainment industry, ect.

(9 points, replying to "I wonder who runs these record labels?" which was setting up that reply)

https://web.archive.org/web/20200620202415/https://old.reddi...

Like I said before, I'm critical of censorship. I used to be a free speech absolutist. I think I'm not quite an absolutist any more (using 8chan for years disillusioned me a little), but I still think censorship is rarely justified. China is of course terrible.

That said, I don't buy the slippery slope argument. My country bans holocaust denial, and though I think that ideally it shouldn't, it hasn't actually slipped down the slope and the situation seems stable. 8chan currently bans certain content that it didn't in the past (it's now much stricter against photographs of children) and it's still incredibly permissive.

If 8chan stopped allowing posts that promote shootings it wouldn't end up becoming like China. I don't think it would lead to other more draconian restrictions.

The harm of censorship usually outweighs the benefit (if any), but not in this case, I think. It's probably ok for 8chan to change its policies a little - and I do mean just a little.

Radicalization happens through words. You can ban radicalization by banning words.

That won't completely get rid of it, but it can make it a lot less accessible, which reduces the amount of radicalization that occurs. I don't think people start out with the intent to get radicalized. They stumble upon a place like /pol/ and see that it's interesting and so they stick around and gradually get convinced. It's much harder to stumble upon a Tor hidden service or a private chatroom than a publicly accessible webpage.

China's great firewall is not terribly hard to get around, but it's very effective regardless. Inconvenience is powerful.

Deciding to commit mass murder rarely happens in a vacuum. It typically happens when you surround yourself all day by people who tell you that mass murder is a good idea. Radicalization is a social phenomenon.

I'm critical of censorship, but not because I think it's ineffective.

8chan's /pol/ is much larger than /leftypol/. I believe it's about tied with /v/, and those two are the largest boards. There are many basically innocent parts of 8chan, but /pol/ makes up a significant fraction of the site's activity, maybe as much as a third.

/pol/ is full of people who encourage shootings, and the website's and board's rules allow people to encourage shootings. You're not allowed to encourage shootings anywhere on Facebook, I think. That's a very significant difference between the two.

> Each board is individually ran and the global moderators won't get involved unless it's content that's blatantly illegal.

That's true for almost every other board, but /pol/ isn't individually run. It was seized by the site administration, and they make its rules.

It's still more work, because some people will get upset that they're not allowed to promote genocide. It still has edge cases (I've seen some hairy examples from Facebook moderation guidelines). It's also still more of a free speech issue than deleting spam is.

That doesn't mean such a ban would be bad, but it is complicated, and someone who doesn't like genocide might still not want it.

> They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.

Reddit used to be like that as far as I know, and though there's plenty to criticize I don't think Reddit was intentionally set up to become a breeding ground for violent racists.

8chan's policy about spam is very different from how a policy against racism would look. What it in practice means is that if someone posts the same suspicious link on a hundred boards they may be hit by a global ban instead of leaving the mess for individual board owners to clean up. Even very principled proponents of free speech usually don't mind that.

There's no guarantee that spam will be cleaned up, it just doesn't get the protection of it being up to the board owner. For a long time 8chan didn't even have a functional anti-spam system. It's a practical matter foremost.

A rule against racism would be much more thornier. It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work and it would be more arbitrary. And it would go against the sensibilities of the original founder, who's a libertarian (I don't know if he's racist).

8chan wasn't created to be a breeding ground for violent racists. It was created to be a make-your-own-forum website with minimalist rules. For the first year, before gamergate drove more people to it, it was just that. In July 2014 an innocent roleplaying board was the most popular: http://web.archive.org/web/20140701141242/https://8chan.co/b...

/pol/ is not an organization. It's a loose community of people, almost none of whom have done anything worse than expressing terrible opinions.

Shootings are incentivized by /pol/ and frequently announced there, but they're not planned on /pol/.

I don't think "/pol/ operatives" meaningfully exist.

Jim Watkins owns a lot of things, including 2channel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel), a pig farm, and a VPS/VPN/webhosting provider. It's unlikely that those audiobooks are the biggest source of income.

> I'm guessing/assuming that 8chan is an anything goes censorship free community (like 4chan was/is?). And maybe it's not explicitly in support of racist ideals but instead refuses to condemn any ideologies or discussion

More or less. More so than 4chan.

8chan is like Reddit (and unlike 4chan) in that it allows anyone to set up a subcommunity that they can moderate however they like. Only illegal content (and nude/sexual images of children, and certain spam) isn't allowed at all. Individual boards may be moderated very tightly.

There are all kinds of boards there, even for communists, and for Muslims. They're scrupulous about allowing even things they don't like.

/pol/ is the board where these manifestos keep getting posted. The shootings generally get celebrated there. It's actively moderated, as visible in the moderation log: https://8ch.net/log.php?board=pol

But /pol/ is not just any board. I stopped paying attention after the Christchurch shooting, but at that time, it was the only large global board, a board owned by the administration. Global site volunteers, who are normally only authorized to handle illegal content (aside from roles they have on other boards) were allowed to moderate /pol/. The site owners set the rules and policies for the board and appointed its ordinary (non-global) moderators.

/pol/ became a global board after its previous owner mismanaged it and the administration seized it. The community was already like that, and if the administration tried to change things locally people would just flock to a different more permissive board. But I think 8chan is a little more than just a platform in this case.

That's fair.

They're not treated the same, though. Using /pol/ is considered acceptable, but posting as if you're on /pol/ often isn't. Using /leftypol/ at all isn't considered acceptable.

I didn't put it clearly, and not entirely correctly either. Sorry about that.

To the extent the site has an overarching culture, it's right-wing. There are boards outside the overarching culture (I said there were only "few" earlier, but I don't know if that's right).

/tech/ is the largest technology board. It's part of the overarching culture. It has a clear political leaning, even if that leaning is not part of the rules or the stated topic or the moderation policy. If you look at /tech/'s catalog, there's threads like "Stallman Going SJW on us?" and "Apple - FULL ON JEWMODE".

/christian/ has a /christian/pol sticky that encourages people from all parts of the political spectrum to post but seems to have primarily right-wing posters in practice.

/lit/'s second non-sticky is "Race Realism/biological determinism Books".

Not everyone on those boards is right-wing, of course. Being right-wing isn't their defining characteristic. And there are other boards that don't have this.

But boards with a politically neutral moderation policy that get cross-posters from other boards are likely to end up with a culture that's right-wing.

/leftypol/ is explicitly left-wing, so even its cross-posters are left-wing. Some smaller boards mainly get users through other means, so they're decoupled from the site culture. Non-English boards might be insulated as well, but I've never used any of the large ones so I can't tell.

Large boards tend to lean right though.

/leftypol/ is insulated. Mentions of it on other boards are usually hostile.

Its existence tells you a lot about the consistency of the free speech policy, but it tells you little about the political leanings of other boards, particularly /pol/.

I think /leftypol/ is important but I don't think it's very relevant to a claim that /pol/ is populated by the extreme right, which seems to be the context here.

/pol/ is around five times as active as /leftypol/.

8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here.

Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.

The "ip" field used to hold the plain IP address, so it's still called that, even though it now holds a hash.

The post() function fills it in like so:

  $query->bindValue(':ip', isset($post['ip']) ? $post['ip'] : $identity);

It's called from https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB/blob/master/post.php#L988, but $post never gets an 'ip' key, so it always uses $identity (which was created using getIdentity(), which currently hashes the IP address).

I think the method you describe for checking whether a post could have come from an IP address would work, if they gave up all the relevant salts. secure_trip_salt isn't supposed to change. hashSalt is also needed, because the IDs are generated using the hashed IP addresses, but it's changed infrequently from what I remember (changing it logs out all moderators because sessions are tied to IP addresses, so it's easy to notice).

Tor posters are assigned an ID of "000000". I only see two posts with that ID in the screenshots in the document.

The fork lives at https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB.

IPs are hashed at https://github.com/OpenIB/OpenIB/blob/master/inc/functions.p.... Hashing them was part of the point of the fork.

  $identity = crypt($userIP, '$2a$07$' . $hashSalt . '$');

poster_id is probably called with the hashed IP address.