News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the Public [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the P... by komali2 on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @02:57PM (#14555111)
Hm, not sure left leaning organizations would have any success on 4chan. There was an obvious alt right Astro turfing campaign for the past few years, though. 4chan used to be a solid seat of extreme liberalism, and it swapped seemingly overnight to hardcore conservativism. Same with /r/conspiracy
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the P... by __jal on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @03:28PM (#14555357)
> 4chan used to be a solid seat of extreme liberalism

Uh, when was that?

Some members/participants/whatever you want to call it of Anonymous had goals that align better with U.S. definitions of 'liberal' than 'conservative', but that doesn't support your assertion.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the P... by metaphorm on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @03:07PM (#14555199)
was 4chan ever "liberal" in the sense that the term is used in American politics? that doesn't vibe with my impression of the community there. It's always had a lot of libertarian undercurrents but was really just disaffected and non-partisan until the Trump thing happened.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the P... by lightbyte on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @03:41PM (#14555452)
4chan used to be anti-mainstream. During the bush years it was fairly liberal, and with Obama it became extremely conservative. Trump was seemingly able to break this trend by embracing them and their practices ("meme magic").
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the P... by meric on Thursday June 15, 2017 @03:35AM (#14558561)
Arguably supporting Trump is anti mainstream.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the P... by opportune on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @03:34PM (#14555400)
The Trump thing was a snowball effect. /pol/ was definitely a Trump supporting corner of the website to begin with, but since it was (especially before /r/the_donald blew up) pretty much the only place doing that for quite some time, it ended up attracting a lot more users to the website in general. Source: http://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org
[ Parent | on HN ]