At a personal level, if I want to hear a point of view I never heard, or that is a blind spot for me about a specific topic, it's one place where I can find it.
If I need to find extreme arguments against my own point of view, or total opposite passionate takes on something I'm sure about, it's one place where I can find it.
It I need to be surprised, if I'm looking for deviant creativity, if I want to learn something weird and new or be taken out of my comfort zone, it's one place where I can find it.
In that sense, 4chan is, paradoxically, one of the most genuine, purest human forum experience you can get. And yes it's terrible because of this. It's insulting, full of bullshit, hosting plenty of people with dangerous ideas.
But that's also its value.
I don't want to live in a world where people can only write things I could think about, or things that would not hurt me.
Most terrible things at least some people love. That doesn't mean they're not terrible.
Edit: comment was edited with more detail while I was typing
Either the mass killing didn't really originate from it, or it did, and the authorities never acted on the very easy to find messages to prevent it.
So either we just rewrite history, linking the horror to something easy to blame, in which case the medias are not doing their job, or the authorities pretend something that is both easy to access and out of their control, in which case they are not doing their job. In all cases, somebody is either incompetent or dishonest.
But as a concerned citizen, I think having a honey pot such as 4chan should be considered a national security asset.
Of course, it's likely this has nothing to do with 4chan, and everything to do with people needing an easy answer to a complicated problem, or scapegoat.
> Either the mass killing didn't really originate from it, or it did, and the authorities never acted on the very easy to find messages to prevent it.
I worked with law enforcement to build new investigative tools for them. They are woefully unequipped to handle a lot of proactive investigation on the Internet. I would absolutely argue the latter.
> it's likely this has nothing to do with 4chan
Our tools of communication absolutely effect our thinking. A tool of mass communication effects or collective thinking. This is why the line for protected speech is such a challenging topic.
We've agreed that threats of violence violate the law. We've agreed that spam should be banned even though it violates no law. I think it's fair to argue that extremist content shouldn't be given a platform for recruitment. Because that platform is invaluable.
How to prevent that is a separate issue. I'm personally a fan of removing flagged content from search results while still leaving the posts, but that's just one approach.
The only challege is that you don't want to allow speech you disagree with. If speech were not an effective tool to steer our collective thinking, we would not have a first amendment.
Banning extremist content is the road to serfdom. What's extreme to one half of the country is common sense to the other half.
I'm absolutely for speech I disagree with our find offensive. That's how our culture evolves, how new ideas are tested and either adopted or discarded.
I'm adamantly opposed to speech that is a call for or a deliberate incitement of violence.
> Banning extremist content is the road to serfdom
Let's be clear about what we mean by extremism, because blanket statements like this lack any nuance and are incongruent with how any government or institution had interpreted free speech.
Is banning spam the road to serfdom? Is banning direct calls to violence the road to serfdom? Is preventing doxxing our revenge porn?
Extremist content is only concerning when it results in real-world violence. At that point, I am unable to opt out (i.e. not visit the site) and therefore am forced to have an opinion and react.
And, to be clear, there is a big difference between an extremely unpopular ideology and a call to violence for that ideology
To use an extreme example. The US government as a whole had plenty of information to stop 9/11, but the US government isn’t a singular hyper intelligent thing that can automatically correlate any information it receives with any other piece of information it receives. It’s limited by being made up of people and sharing information isn’t free.
Similarly a firehouse of 99.999% junk information isn’t particularly useful for police action. This is why the massive array of cameras in say London does a poor job of preventing crimes and 4chan posts are’t useful for preventing attacks.
You describe the messages as "very easy to find" but I'm not convinced that's true. Identifying threatening content, understanding which may be genuine and which are "for the lols", cross-referencing against other posts and data sources to de-anonymize and evaluate the threat level of specific individuals...this is a tremendous amount of work requiring complex solutions.
It's all technically within the capability of the authorities, but would require massive investment to support this at scale.
You could do something like give the cops live access to back-end data to make some of that easier, but I don't think most *chan defenders would be much of a fan of that.
Whether I chose to engage with something is independent from whether it's terrible or not.
The point I'm guessing that your trying to make is that I can choose to not visit the site, and therefore it shouldn't be censored in any way (even though I didn't actually call for censorship).
If that's what you're arguing, you have to address 1) whether the site itself amplifies extremist behavior, and 2) if it does, whether random mass killings events is worth having 0 moderation.
No amount of 4chan posts will cause a healthy person to become a violent extremist. And no amount of censorship can stop the rise of extremism. It can at best impact the precise expression of it. It won’t stop people from committing acts of violence or believing insane ideologies, it will just change the content of their manifesto. At worst it can accelerate their rise, as extremists become further convinced society is unjustly persecuting them.
We used to have to refer to historical material for that.
Now we can see it unfold in a sandbox.
If you are an historian, an economist, a psychologist or a sociologist, 4chan is something that deserves a look.
I mostly agree, however our methods of communication are fundamentally part of our social structures. I don't think they can be extricated from the actions that we take. If a website's infrastructure encourages and promotes extremist dialogue, that is, in of itself, part of the broken social structure.
> No amount of 4chan posts will cause a healthy person to become a violent extremist. And no amount of censorship can stop the rise of extremism.
I think this lacks nuance. 4chan absolutely won't take a healthy person to an extremist. But extremist content absolutely takes mildly unhealthy people and 1) radicalizes them, and 2) gives them a social infrastructure to support extremist behavior. This is why YouTube blocks ISIS recruitment videos.
It's a contradiction to believe that both "freedom of speech matters" and "regular consumption of extremist speech has no impact".
It may be that what is lost by constraining the madness of humanity is greater than what is gained. It is not clear, but there are people who would fight tooth and nail to see the madness, and the value they find within it, remain.
Personally, I do not want to live in a monoculture of mutually-acceptable perspectives.
Totally fair, but there's a lot of options between "monoculture" and "total free-for-all"
I also think your discounting that many cultures are unable to exist in free-for-alls. There isn't a clear line from "fewer boundaries" -> "more diversity". There's a sweet spot that allows the maximum amount of freedom for the most people, and that isn't laissez-faire
Obliterating the places where those extreme debates happen would not give us this opportunity.
In fact, there is a particularly popular political ideology that lead to an attack on the white house recently in the USA if I recall.
Like churches? Maybe the problem is that 4chanism isn't a recognized religion.
Extremism is so relative and not universal that I can guarantee that the use of edgy language and some aneurotypical behavior is the least weird and destructive thing going on in our world right now.
For instance, antinomianism isn't just tolerated in the United States, it's taught and embraced at a level that the people who believe it don't even know the word for it. However, there's nothing more extreme or terrifying than people who live under the belief that nothing matters in life as long as they fulfill the mission of their faith because their true and eternal reward only comes after.
From those oddball Christian big game hunters seeking to prove that "God gave man dominion over animals", to companies that don't care about pollution because not producing to the limit of their abilities is wasting a gift from God, to the Hobby Lobby family funding ISIL by buying up ransacked early Christian artifacts, to child brides and arranged marriages in sleepy little towns across the country, there are people who are brainwashed into believing they're in a fight or die battle for their souls over things as non-controversial as celebrating certain holidays, bodily autonomy and consensual relationships, having equal healthcare access, upholding separation of church and state, or ensuring access to quality education.
On the other side of that coin are people who believe everything is okay as long as you or someone else is paying for it. It's a different type of religion and no less cruel or violent.
Not that they're harmless, but I'm not afraid of Pepe memers. I'm afraid of raising my family near a future Superfund site, that kids are growing up being better prepared for mass shootings than to succeed in college, and for anyone nearby when some cave dweller opens fire or sets off a bomb at a women's clinic.
4chan, as a website, is far more varied than you think at first glance. Most people only hear about 4chan when "something happens", and with the news cycle, that's pretty much always bad things. For example, an anonymous 4chan post solved a 25-year-old math problem[0]. It's unfair to paint a whole popular website by the activities of some of its users on one or two of its discussion boards.
There are some boards dedicated to sharing anime porn. Others, discussing technology. There's one for discussing favorite toys, one for wrestling, and another for the Hasbro show My Little Pony.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...
I'll admit that one of my biases, either for our against a site, is how thoughtful the people in charge are. Even though the communities grow organically, they're inevitably influenced by the controls put into place by the site owner.
When the professed attitude is"I don't give a shit, pay me", I don't think the owner will effectively respond to the extreme cases
But it's not the only place. Nor is it even a main place. Nor is it a place to find high-quality versions of any of these things.
There are far better places to find opposing, passionate points of view. Far better sources for creativity and weird things, far better places to find a wide range of views.
The way you write, it basically sounds like you're mistaking 4chan for the internet as a whole. Trust me -- if 4chan disappeared, there's still practically an infinity of things written that you couldn't think about.
Hell, forget the internet, you'll find an awful lot of them just in a research library. Especially from roughly the 1930's to the 1970's, artists, political theorists, and psychotherapists were coming up with a lot "edgier" stuff and ideas than you're probably even remotely aware of, just to pick a few areas.
In fact, forget engaging with human beings -- try a library?
>4chan is, paradoxically, one of the most genuine, purest human forum experience you can get
This is unimpeachably true, imo. There's something equal parts magical and horrible about unfiltered humanity, especially after living in digital mind-prisons where we have to be careful about not angering our advertiser jailers while self-aggrandizing and posturing on a feed instead of actually talking directly to people, all of us anonymous and shed of baggage and upvotes and reputation.
I still believe this, even after I stopped using 4chan cuz edgy teen humor gets old after a while and the horrible parts of it start being unhealthy. :p Modern "social" media makes me miss it sometimes though.
I wouldn't trust a character assasination attempt coming from the mouth of Erich Mielke, either.
If you used the site for any length of time, you'd know that even on 4chan the groups you mentioned are not universally accepted. Anonymity works both ways and they are also hated with complete impunity.
It's precisely the anonymous nature of the site that makes posting so easy and consequence-free. There is no reputation to worry about, you can just share ideas and see how others react. Did you know Andreas Kling, creator of SerenityOS, used to post progress reports on the Daily Programming Thread of 4chan's technology board as far back as 2018-2019? I know because I was there.