> 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.
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.