
A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf] - zczc
https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15670/14790
======
peruvian
I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!"
trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan.

I spent a lot of time between 2006-2014 on various boards like /a/, /mu/, /g/,
and /int/ until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was
politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers. Made me quit the site (well,
that and other things).

Sometimes you just want to meme about the latest bad anime episode, not have a
poorly researched debate about race and politics.

~~~
Kec71
Nevertheless, /pol/ and r/the_donald were one of main factors why Donald Trump
got elected. This crowdsurfing phenomenon holds tremendous amount of power.

~~~
sotojuan
What's crazy is that in the Bush/early Obama years 4chan was fairly liberal in
terms of politics.

~~~
fiblye
I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift?
Because it's something I noticed as well.

Something happened that has pushed much of the general internet and large
swathes of the "geekier" parts of the net to the right, and it doesn't seem to
be letting up. The media ran with the "Russian shills" thing for a while, but
it seems to be running out of steam and people I've known for years who used
to lean firmly left are now either fairly far right, or left leaning but
absolutely hate the left establishment and support the right purely out of
spite.

~~~
aphextron
>I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift?
Because it's something I noticed as well.

It was 8 years of a Democratic, fairly liberal president. People like to rebel
against whatever is in fashion. The right wing is now "edgy" because it rails
against the prevailing political power

The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world defined
by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which has taken
over our media in the past decade. Be prepared for a radical push back from
Trumpism by the subsequent generations that grow up under the current
political climate. I imagine the pendulum will swing back with a vengeance
after this one.

~~~
vim_wannabe
>The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world
defined by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which
has taken over our media in the past decade.

Absolutely false, kids do not watch Fox News, and I'm not sure what you mean
by 'taken over our media'. The generation of kids now posting on 4chan
actually group up watching shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which
took one sentence sound bites from people, put labels (you might know which
ones) on them and made them into a huge spectacle.

~~~
aphextron
>The generation of kids now posting on 4chan actually group up watching shows
like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which took one sentence sound bites from
people, put labels (you might know which ones) on them and made them into a
huge spectacle.

It's two sides of the same extreme, both of which have driven people to the
far right (Trumpism) and left (Antifa) respectively. Stewart is a perfect
example of this childish false dichotomy created by the media to set people
against one another. There's clearly a lot of money in tribalism.

As far as 'taking over our media', what I meant is the rise of far right talk
radio and things like Alex Jones being taken legitimately. These things have
made it impossible for a normal person to filter out the nonsense these days.

------
AndrewKemendo
There is no way to study 4chan. It's like an electron, if you measure it, it's
position will change and you'll be back to the start.

 _the majority of /pol/ posts (about 84%) are either neutral or negative_

They are looking at a board full of "trolls trolling trolls" as they like to
put it and then coming to the conclusion that everyone is negative. The leap
then is when it comes to tying it to hate speech in the same context as would
be elsewhere.

 _“Nigger” is the most popular hate word, used in more than 2% of posts, while
“faggot” and “retard” appear in over 1% of posts._

I submit, based on my experience with /b/ in the past, that there is a
different context behind the use of these words on 4chan versus the rest of
the world. In fact in both of those cases a poster, typically "OP" is called
one of those terms, viscerally and without thought for content or demographic
makeup (largely because it's not known). So for example if you post a picture
that is silly or not particularly relevant then a string of "OP is a faggot"
comments will commence in an almost ritualized manner.

Further, it's only in the rarest cases that someone from outside of 4chan
finds their way to any one of the boards (not crawled by google AFAIK) and
then posts something, not understanding the community, it's like metafilter in
that way. It's a self selected group of trolls, hackers and curious people. So
I think this study comes to the wrong conclusions:

 _However, we are confident that our findings can serve as a foundation for
interesting and valuable future work exploring fringe groups like the alt-
right, hate speech, and online harassment campaigns_

Extremely doubtful. 4Chan would be considered a "Chaotic Neutral" character.
They do terrible stuff and great stuff, but no group can harness it for their
own purposes. "Not your personal Army" is a common theme - which the study
didn't even pay attention to. If the group smells blood they will attack, no
matter who it is or what cause, "4 teh lulz." I mean that's where "Anonymous"
basically originated.

This is a great example of how embedding yourself into a culture is the only
way to understand it - which these researchers didn't do.

~~~
aphextron
>Extremely doubtful. 4Chan would be considered a "Chaotic Neutral" character.
They do terrible stuff and great stuff, but no group can harness it for their
own purposes. "Not your personal Army" is a common theme - which the study
didn't even pay attention to. If the group smells blood they will attack, no
matter who it is or what cause, "4 teh lulz." I mean that's where "Anonymous"
basically originated.

I think this sums up 2012 4chan perfectly. However things have changed
drastically. There is an extremely rigid, narrowly defined viewpoint of alt-
right Trumpism there now. If you do not fall in line with it, you will be
ostracized and targeted for attack. Before it was all about the 'lulz' and
attacking people for no good reason. It is now an organized right wing hate
machine with a very specific ideology.

~~~
nathanasmith
>I think this sums up 2012 4chan perfectly. However things have changed
drastically. There is an extremely rigid, narrowly defined viewpoint of alt-
right Trumpism there now. If you do not fall in line with it, you will be
ostracized and targeted for attack. Before it was all about the 'lulz' and
attacking people for no good reason. It is now an organized right wing hate
machine with a very specific ideology.

/pol/ is almost entirely satire. The fact that so many people are falling for
said satire makes it even funnier.

~~~
Shaanie
There are plenty of people that do not see large parts of /pol/ as satire. In
fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of the posters on /pol/ largely
agree with the general culture.

It's interesting to me that you assume that it's entirely satire because
that's not at all the view I have, nor the view of my friends who regularly
post there.

------
anon6778
Previously on HN (2016):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705851)

Original version of the paper with "rare pepes":
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03452.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03452.pdf)

------
ViktorV
I live in the EU, and what I see is that the two sides ( progressives / modern
conservatives ) almost say the same things with very subtle differences, and
the real difference is the way they talk.

I saw a comment here that stated that a neoliberal won against a progressive
which is right. But every poll shows that Bernie would have won against Trump.
This basically means that the right wingers actually agree with the
progressive talking points: global warming, health care, and a little bit of
anti globalism. This also means that Hillary didn't represent these.

I've also seen here that there is there is no left wing push. Some talking
points of Hillary are the best example of that, for ex. "vote for me because
I'm a woman". Many people who think that there are no major differences
between a man and a woman will think that this statement is sexist. There is a
push to be kind with everyone and it is forced on people very hard ( NASA guy
with the shirt ).

This is very real as you can see in many comments. This like racism against
black people in the U.S: if you ask black people many will say that they never
experienced it, same like conservatives, but this doesn't necessary mean that
it doesn't exists.

My main point that the progressive movement has two sides: one with important
issues which are physically influences our lives, and one which wants social
change. IMHO the social changes they want aren't that great, and the means
they try to achieve that are very very bad. The mainstream part of democrats
turned to the social part, and that caused this change.

My question for liberals here, who just don't understand why 4chan changed: Do
you think what I've stated here is true? Why not? If yes then why the
connection between the alt-right and leftist push is wrong?

------
flycaliguy
I did a fair bit of browsing on 4chan's /pol as well as the less chaotic 8ch
dot net /pol.

I don't have strong evidence but I got the sense that there was more than just
trolls trolling trolls. It felt like psychological operations. It felt like a
community with calibrated narrative control and engineered content by
motivated parties.

A lot of memes designed to target sexual insecurity. At the top of the
messaging, a mutation of the "Pick up artist" school of evolutionary
psychology designed to create a racist world view.

------
awirth
If this is a subject that interests you, I'd recommend reading Angela Nagle's
Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the
alt-right[1]. It's a really level-headed look at online identity politics.
It's an extension of her The Baffler article "The New Man of 4chan"[2], from
last year which went into /r9k/, but in her book she analyzes both "sides"
(4chan and tumblr, if you will) which I thought was really interesting
analysis, even considering I watched it all unfold as it was happening.

[1]: [http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies](http://www.zero-
books.net/books/kill-all-normies) [2]: [https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-
man-4chan-nagle](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle)

------
aisofteng
Website is unusable on iOS (can't scroll in the frame). Direct link to a PDF
of the article: [http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Stringhini/papers/4chan-
ICW...](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Stringhini/papers/4chan-
ICWSM2017.pdf)

------
makomk
Extreme left is probably not quite right, "totalitarian left" would probably
be closer to the mark. A left that considers all its views and actions beyond
question and wields social justice ideas as weapons against dissent. For
example, remember how every criticism of Hillary Clinton the neoliberal
warmonger was and still is blamed on misogyny? How Sanders and his supporters
were smeared as sexists and racists and all sorts? Every single idea in the
modern social justice arsenal has become a cynical tool to protect the
powerful and the status quo. And don't even get me started on the gloating
about poor, lower-class white folks dying of drug addictions, or the articles
in rags like the Guardian hoping for the day when demographic shifts mean the
Democrats don't have to care about what happens to them anymore because their
votes are irrelevant; Richard Spencer couldn't come up with a better fucking
argument for white supremacy if he tried. It doesn't matter that none of this
is actually left-wing, because it's beyond criticism or challenge.

~~~
s_kilk
The thing you're talking about is not Leftism, it's Identitarianism.

Remember, the left-right dichotomy is about how the means of production should
be owned and controlled. While the Left does also stand for such progressive
causes such as anti-racism and anti-sexism, the contemporary
Liberal/Clintonite strain of Identitarianism doesn't have much overlap with
actual Leftism.

~~~
digi_owl
Not quite.

Back in the day the left-right thing happened over who backed the king of
France or not, by where they physically stood in the room.

And it was very much a social rather than economical thing back then.

Keep in mind that right-wing has often been used synonymously with
conservative. As in preserving the social status quo of classes and whatsnot.

Later on, with socialism/communism coming into play, workers parties and
traditional leftist parties found much common ground.

In Norway we have this "hilarious" situation where we have two parties names
Venstre (Left) and Høyre (Right), whole both are to the right politically
speaking of Arbeiderpartiet (Workers Party).

BTW Venstre is a bit player in Norwegian politics these days, while the
biggest parties are Arbeiderpartiet and Høyre (the two taking turns leading
the government in cooperation with various smaller parties).

During the last 4 years Venstre has even acted as a underwriter of the Høyre
lead government, even though they keep voicing disproval of their actual
policies.

------
maximumkek
How will /pol/ ever recover??

~~~
mishurov
tfw you fell into the machine learning meme

