You could say the exact same thing about Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other form of social media. People get absorbed in ideas all the time, and those platforms just multiply the intensity.
Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was. Some of the shit I've seen on Twitter made it unbearable to go on my day and yet on 4chan, on boards like /vg/, /ck/, /g/, /wg/ it was mostly just shitposts and once in a while you would see a good post.
All I can do is shrug.. People with no clue will always just yell.
>You could say the exact same thing about Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other form of social media. People get absorbed in ideas all the time, and those platforms just multiply the intensity. Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was.
Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos there (referencing not only the ideology they learned from the site, but even the in-jokes of the people cheering for it on the site) before doing their own shootings? And then after that, do those sites regularly completely refuse the concept of doing anything to try to prevent repeats?
I'm sure that other sites have been guilty of bits and pieces of that, but the combination makes 8chan on another level than any of those.
I'm in the same boat as DonHopkins. I've seen people who used to be friends get sucked into far alt-right stuff through 8chan specifically. Maybe it happens with Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, but I haven't seen it and haven't seen many people here bring up any experiences like that.
> Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos on Twitter?
Yes I have many times. Just this weekend alone, the Ohio shooter tweeted "Kill every fascist", retweeted several violent Antifa posts. His Twitter profile read “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” His top pinned tweet said “Millennials have a message for the Joe Biden generation: hurry up and die.” In May, he tweeted, “You’ll never be rid of me. I’ll haunt your life like a fucking vengeful spirit.” He added, “My Horoscope Just Reads ‘Doom.'” He shared posts about “concentration camps” at the border and wrote, “Cut the fences down. Slice ICE tires. Throw bolt cutters over the fences.” He retweeted a post from another person about stealing from “right wingers” at a Trump rally. One of his tweets referred to white people. “Imagine if we did the thing you liked, but in a way that totally ruins what you liked about it! Wouldn’t that be fun? Ha ha Also, of course they’re all white people, of course they are,” he wrote.
From another comment:
> "Dayton shooter Was The Lead Singer Of A "Pornogrind" Metal Band - The gunman, identified as 24 year-old (wont be named), was a member of Menstrual Munchies, a three-man band that performed regularly on the Midwest death metal scene. All the Dark Metal Bands that were friends with the shooter are distancing themselves extremely fast. All their music supports antifascists (aka antifa) and their genre of music is defined by its explicit subject matter and themes of gore and violence, specifically sexual violence and necrophilia."
> "Betts was also in a “Pornogrind” Band that, according to Vice News, “released songs about raping and killing women.” Vice called it the “extreme metal music scene.” The bands he performed in sometimes were called Menstrual Munchies and Putrid Liquid, and the songs contained vile names like “6 Ways of Female Butchery” and “Preeteen Daughter Pu$$y Slaughter,” Vice reported."
> Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.
>All the Dark Metal Bands that were friends with the shooter are distancing themselves extremely fast.
If the groups of these other shooters had instead responded by distributing propaganda that literally canonized the shooters like saints and praised future shooters in order to encourage more, then it might be comparable. (You don't have to look far at all on 8chan for this type of thing.) I'm probably only in the tamest of lefty circles, but I've never seen anything remotely like that. I don't see these shootings celebrated; it seems like a much harder argument to make that they're encouraged in lefty places than the argument that 8chan encourages violence.
Sorry that's not the argument I was trying to make. The argument I was trying to make is that Twitter, FB groups etc all have these type of violent posts but they are not being held liable (most likely because they are way too big and maybe also because they are US based companies). Reddit has subreddits which actively call for assassination of political figures. I have reported them a few times but the posts stay on because maybe the mods aren't getting paid to do their jobs on reddit unlike the other big companies.
Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was. Some of the shit I've seen on Twitter made it unbearable to go on my day and yet on 4chan, on boards like /vg/, /ck/, /g/, /wg/ it was mostly just shitposts and once in a while you would see a good post.
All I can do is shrug.. People with no clue will always just yell.