
After New Zealand Shooting, Founder of 8chan Expresses Regrets - longdefeat
https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-new-zealand-shooting-founder-of-8chan-expresses-regrets-11553130001
======
crankylinuxuser
This is a hackjob article. "Expresses regret", really now?

According to this google doc
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vNye_et1JZQquT9Oiz1wVnikEGU...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vNye_et1JZQquT9Oiz1wVnikEGU8zUZ7/view)

Title: Towards a peer-to-peer imageboard: essential elements thereof and
approaches compared

Author: Fredrick R. Brennan

Date: March 16, 2019

If someone who wants "more censorship" as the WSJ article espouses, along with
“I have no desire to ever be involved in the image-board world again,” he
said. “A lot of these sites cause more misery than anything else.”

.... Why would you work on a P2P censorship resistant, completely anonymous
imageboard? Page 5 of that document puts it best:

"The Christchurch massacare adds new urgency, with publications like The Verge
floating the idea of shuttering 8chan, Forbes flat out asking whether or not
8chan should be “wiped from the web”, and the ever poorly researched Daily Dot
offering its attempting to instigate action against 8chan and imageboards more
widely."

I don't believe the WSJ in their reporting. They either got duped, or wrote an
intentionally false article.

------
hbosch
[https://outline.com/8EN9Nb](https://outline.com/8EN9Nb)

~~~
__alias
amazing, thanks

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mindslight
Alternative narrative: A great way to create an echo chamber of people with
abhorrent views is to drive them all off of general platforms.

~~~
filleokus
Yeah. I recently checked out Voat, as it was proposed as an alternative for
reddit. Not saying that it’s representative of the whole community, but the
top of /v/programming was quite, erm, different to what I excepted:
[https://voat.co/v/programming/top?span=all](https://voat.co/v/programming/top?span=all)

~~~
fratlas
Oh wow, Australian ISPs have blocked voat/4chan/8chan

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freen
The paradox of tolerance is real.

Seems like humans have to rediscover this fact every couple of generations,
the hard way.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

~~~
mindslight
Isn't fighting intolerance exactly what someone who shoots up a mosque _thinks
they 're doing_?

Finding paradoxes in absolutely-defined frameworks is _expected_ \- a concept
like "tolerance" can only ever serve as an imperfect _heuristic_. To proceed
beyond its limits, you must judge by other metrics.

~~~
Random_BSD_Geek
I don't particularly care what someone who murders a bunch of people "thinks
they're doing." Perhaps that makes me intolerant.

~~~
mindslight
You mean that you don't care about discouraging the next one? _That 's_ the
motivation to understand.

The point is that this "Paradox of tolerance" meme is invokable to escalate
the aggression of _any viewpoint_ \- a paradox in the common (not not A -> A)
logic system means anything can be proved.

We don't have a problem with the murderer and his enablers because they were
_intolerant_ , but because they committed and encouraged _murder_.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _You mean that you don 't care about discouraging the next one?..._

Can't really discourage the next one at this point unfortunately. People are
going to do things like this, they have been for a while and will continue to
do so in the future. These ideological extremists will be arguing back and
forth forever.

All that said, there is the completely separate question of what our counter-
terrorism infrastructure should be doing to identify and neutralize these
threats. But that's not so much "discouraging" the next attack as it is
attempting to keep the number of attacks to a minimum. Because I can pretty
much guarantee, the counter-terrorism guys in NZ, or most other western
nations, are not gonna be visiting suspected terrorists for the purposes of
having a conversation in the hopes of "discouraging" them.

~~~
drusepth
The motivation behind understanding what drives these kinds of extremists is
to understand what about their view of the world drove them to start shooting
people up, and then identify what led them to that point in their life and
start addressing those problems such that other people don't end up in a
similar position. A bit of a cat and mouse game in an abstract sense, but
understanding and preventing future attacks by like-minded individuals
requires understanding what leads someone to such a bad state in the first
place.

This is, of course, in _addition_ to other counter-terrorism infrastructure
like intelligence gathering, monitoring, security, response, etc. Many of
those more well-known systems are intended to identify bad actors and prevent
them from doing bad things; understanding bad actors can lead to more methods
to prevent regular people from becoming bad actors in the first place.

~~~
bilbo0s
>* identify what led them to that point in their life and start addressing
those problems...*

Here's the thing, people been doing this for literally _MILLENNIA_ now, there
_is_ no way to identify everything that will drive extremists to kill. That's
the essential problem with that philosophy. Even where you _are_ able to
identify the core issue, say for instance the religious divisions in the
MidEast region, there is really no way to address the core problem. It's just
far easier to engage the extremists, than it is to convince Christians, or
Jews, or Muslims, to _NOT_ be Christians, or Jews, or Muslims.

Extremists will just never be placated, and we shouldn't put too much effort
into trying, because that gets people killed as well.

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charlesism
The internet, as a whole, doesn't learn lessons easily. Edgelords grow up,
younger edgelords come online and replace them. It's always September.

~~~
freen
The current internet, at least the powers that be, won’t forget and will
easily de-anonymize the current crop of edgelords.

------
patientplatypus
In other news Putin signed into law more internet censorship bills this week.
For all of the people claiming they desire more censorship, who gets to
decide? You? The democratically elected Congress/Legislature/President
(ruhroh)? If you want to fix this problem, the focus should be on helping
those in society who have fallen through the cracks and would desire to harm
others in the first place. Which requires real work and effort put into job
placement programs and social safety net legislation. Instead what we'll
probably do is start banning websites because most people are stupid and
reactionary while real work takes effort. Sigh.

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HNLurker2
His manifesto isn't even worth thinking about. Why I mentioned it? I give the
benefit of the doubt because Ted Kaczynski one was even mentioned on hacker
news and influenced the tech scene. But its not even 1% of that level.

------
yardstick
As an aside, I wish the WSJ didn’t name the terrorist in their article and
instead followed the NZ PM on leaving him nameless. If people really want to
know it they can go to Wikipedia.

~~~
duxup
NPR did a great interview about what might work to prevent or discourage
copycats. It was based on research into what people who commit these crimes
are interested in. They had a couple tips that might make these events less
appetizing for those who might commit them.

\- Not naming the killer frequently was one.

\- Focusing on the victim's lives (basically humanizing them) was another.

\- Not playing videos of the chaos and violence was another.

NPR actually seems to be following those patterns too. Not 100% because news
is news, but I think news ogrs can follow them, and the information is still
free.

~~~
tomp
> Not playing videos of the chaos and violence was another.

What research is this based on? Sounds suspiciously like “computer games cause
violence” which AFAIK has been debunked.

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monsterbash506
he recently put out a draft paper about decentralized imageboards, which we
were discussing on 8chan. We want to make a fully p2p board without
censorship, and optional curation lists (for spam and the like). We are tired
of being beholden to the parties which would like us gone, so we will build
something complemtely open and non-jurisdictional. There will be no censorship
of the board (by governments, ISPs, DNS servers, CA authorities) and no
censorship by board administrators. If the owners leave & turn off their
computers, the site will continue to exist. Juan Benet used the term "open
service," to describe something like this.

[https://t.co/xJt2dR3B7B](https://t.co/xJt2dR3B7B)

~~~
tclancy
Hey man, as long as you can share images.

Everyone else just over here dying because white guys think it’s about their
freedom to do X. And please don’t get confused. I am one too. I want to
suggest if you are spending your time writing DRAFT proposals of a p2p image
sharing amazing protocol that can’t be taken down by any jurisdiction man ....
well that’s theoretically useful for every freedom-loving man everywhere but
most likely something useful to child pornographers and there are lots of
people actually suffering under boots and heels of tyrants now and what they
don’t need is you writing RFPs while sipping Mountain Dew.

If you can’t see all the trolling about race and gender and just people in
general isn’t helpful and is actually causing people harm in meatspace, that’s
something you should work on.

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ng12
8chan is not the problem. People are the problem. If he never made 8chan they
would have congregated somewhere else. I think this idea that unsavory
websites breed their unsavory bits is pretty close to blaming school shootings
on video games.

~~~
briandear
Considering that a bunch of Christians were massacred by Muslims in Nigeria
around the same time as the New Zealand shooting and those killers weren’t
known to be active Internet forum users, your theory seems correct.

[https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/matt-
philbin/2019/...](https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/matt-
philbin/2019/03/19/other-massacre-networks-silent-islamists-butchering-
nigerian)

~~~
duxup
I don't think a given atrocity that doesn't involve the internet... says
anything about what might or might not happen with the internet... your
conclusion makes no sense.

Also that talking point about Christians in Nigeria has been a common talking
point among folks who seem very interested indirectly playing down the NZ
event, and I belive ignores that Muslims were massacred before the Christians
in Nigeria just before the Christian event...

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ec109685
If he felt so strongly, why didn't he shut the site down?

~~~
friedman23
he doesn't own it, you should read the article before posting.

~~~
ec109685
I read the article. He founded and instead of shutting down, he “cut ties”.

~~~
friedman23
yes he cut ties because he doesn't own it. Explain to me how he can shut down
a platform he doesn't own?

