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.
They will allow Racism, but actively moderate out Spam.
What type of joke is this? There is no hiding behind it, they intentionally and actively allow it to become a breeding ground for violent racists.
It's like what in the world did you guys imagining Al Qaeda recruiting msg boards l look like.
"No Al Qaeda msg boards have people claiming for death to Americans".
And 8chan boards are also doing the same thing. It's disgusting, but people are desensitized to how absurd it is.
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...
Obviously it would be more work than doing nothing. That's not an argument to do nothing though. There are plenty of topics moderated away (interpreting the age of teens/children in images for example) and yet those get handled with all of the subjectivity just fine. So that's also unrelated to why.
Noone said that 8chan was intentinoally created to be what it's become - what was said was that it has been allowed to become what it has become with no intervention.
And to your final point, even it's original creator says it should be shut down given what it's turned into. If the principled founder says "this has gone too far", maybe it's time to take it seriously.
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.
Moderating spam is easier. Apparently it's hard to tell between "we should kill these people" and "these people are being killed" due to a language barrier sometimes, and it's hard to automate.
But wow. You all think "let's kill these people" somehow has more value than "buy my shit/here is a malware link", nice. downboat away
I don't mean banning racism, but enticement for violent action.
A lot of people on Hacker News gets extremely upset when some site or institution decides to censor genocide advocacy, racism, or anything at all.
Moderating "racist" comments is very far from straightforward. No one can agree what it would be.
Which of the following statements would be racist?
1. Organizations whose members are exclusively white are appropriate.
2. Organizations whose members are exclusively people of color are appropriate.
3. Blacks are a minority but commit a majority of violent crimes in the U.S.
4. Average height varies by race.
5. Average IQ varies by race.
6. Nigeria is a hellhole.
7. South Africa is a hellhole.
8. I prefer not to date blacks.
---
Even Reddit bans spam but not racism.
The line of reasoning "Since I can't come up with a perfect solution, so instead I'll do nothing at all", is a terrible approach.
The courts get things wrong, credit card fraud detection gets things wrong, anti-virus gets things wrong. Tons of things aren't perfect - that's the real world.
The answer of "well I can't come up with a perfect version of those so let's do nothing" is preposterous.
Shootings are incentivized by /pol/ and frequently announced there, but they're not planned on /pol/.
I don't think "/pol/ operatives" meaningfully exist.
Al Queda is also a loose organization without explicit membership, etc.
I don’t see any difference between the two organizational structures from an anti terror perspective (though Al Queda might sometimes organize humanitarian actions — Many Islamic terrorist groups have a recruiting arm that does this sort of thing, and I can’t keep them straight anymore)
Al Queda is also a loose organization without explicit membership, etc.
I don’t see any difference between the two organizational structures from an anti terror perspective (though Al Queda might sometimes organize humanitarian actions — Many Islamic terrorist groups have a recruiting arm that does this sort of thing, and I can’t keep them straight anymore)
...do you see why your view is absurd? I can paint almost any group with that brush.
(Related to that is the matter of geographic distribution. One of these guys could be your next door neighbor, and the US Military is not allowed to drop bombs in American neighborhoods. That's in the Constitution.)
Let me stop you right there...
> 8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, created the site in response to what he sees as the ongoing and vast loss of free speech on the Internet. On 8chan, “anyone can say what they want and mean,” Brennan told the Daily Dot.
> Brennan now calls 8chan a “free-speech-friendly 4chan alternative.”
> He called 4chan “authoritarian” and accused it of turning into a soulless for-profit venture.
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/8chan-pedophiles-child-porn-...
gamergate Charlottenville
"How Charlottesville and Gamergate are Completely Related"
Second item:
"Matthew Robert Warner: From GamerGate to Identity Evropa"
The second is about one person who is literally the only connection IdentifyEvropa found between the two groups. And what was that connection? He tweeted a few tweets about it.
https://identifyevropa.org/tag/gamergate/
The lack of substantial links only provides evidence that there is no real connection.
Online anonymity permits endless Sybil attacks -- helping turn communities' frustration from anger and rage into violence. 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. But because of other communities' moderation, they likely become one of the bastions of the racists. So even if their ownership never had any interest in hate speech, their platform becomes a de facto mechanism for its spread.
As much problems as anonymity causes I sure don't think that some new Real World Identity driven Internet would be a good idea. But sites with next to no content moderation seem like a bad idea. Not that I can imagine a resolution, really.
~~
I imagine how frustrated I might feel if I didn't have some kind of daily work or creative task to keep me busy and fill me with purpose. If I felt depressed I might be willing to blame it on someone. If everything I read said that in fact there is someone to blame, I wonder: would I be able to see through that? Would I stand up and say 'no, that's wrong: those people aren't the source of our problems'? I like to think I would. But I've definitely caught myself (long after the fact) buying into BS groupthink/hivemind conspiracy hogwash.