> a quick search for "The only good Republican is a dead Republican" returns a lot of hits for the "[...] dead Democrat" quote and almost none for the search phrase
This is muddled by one particular incident with a video Trump posted. Searching the "democrats" phrase in quotes gives 160,000 results. Searching it with -trump -president gives only 4,000 results, and even then some (maybe most) of those results still seem to be about the incident (but spelling his name as "Dump" for example).
In my experience edgy calls for violence are indeed more common from the right than from the left, but this is a bad way to try to measure it.
I don't know how common it was, but I found this in the first comment section I looked:
> Could it be the Chosenbergs? Although a small group, they seem to control the majority of US record labels, as well as the news outlets, the pharmaceutical companies, the bank institutions, the pornography industry, the entertainment industry, ect.
(9 points, replying to "I wonder who runs these record labels?" which was setting up that reply)
Comment sections always have some garbage in them. At least there's a report button that does something.
I visit a number of conservative and libertarian discussion forums and the "blame the jews" conspiracy has completely lost its steam. Don't get me wrong I can see how it's offensive and unwelcoming to jewish people but I just don't see the same level of commitment to the idea that some secret cabal of jews run the world or run America as I used to, just random remarks.
On the other hand it could be these are the same people who were previously writing theses on the matter and they've actually been effectively silenced and only drop hints at the idea anymore.
I guess this is the risk of lurking the front page nowadays; Glancing at a subreddit's memes and never reading their comments apparently put me in the antisemtic camp.
Deciding to commit mass murder rarely happens in a vacuum. It typically happens when you surround yourself all day by people who tell you that mass murder is a good idea. Radicalization is a social phenomenon.
I'm critical of censorship, but not because I think it's ineffective.
Radicalization happens through words. You can ban radicalization by banning words.
That won't completely get rid of it, but it can make it a lot less accessible, which reduces the amount of radicalization that occurs. I don't think people start out with the intent to get radicalized. They stumble upon a place like /pol/ and see that it's interesting and so they stick around and gradually get convinced. It's much harder to stumble upon a Tor hidden service or a private chatroom than a publicly accessible webpage.
China's great firewall is not terribly hard to get around, but it's very effective regardless. Inconvenience is powerful.
Like I said before, I'm critical of censorship. I used to be a free speech absolutist. I think I'm not quite an absolutist any more (using 8chan for years disillusioned me a little), but I still think censorship is rarely justified. China is of course terrible.
That said, I don't buy the slippery slope argument. My country bans holocaust denial, and though I think that ideally it shouldn't, it hasn't actually slipped down the slope and the situation seems stable. 8chan currently bans certain content that it didn't in the past (it's now much stricter against photographs of children) and it's still incredibly permissive.
If 8chan stopped allowing posts that promote shootings it wouldn't end up becoming like China. I don't think it would lead to other more draconian restrictions.
The harm of censorship usually outweighs the benefit (if any), but not in this case, I think. It's probably ok for 8chan to change its policies a little - and I do mean just a little.
I'm happy you expanded your opinion. I'm with you in that I think absolute free speech is very hard to defend.
At the same time I definitely think slippery slope is the right analogy. The definition of what is acceptable speech is constantly changing and IMO there is no telling what the effect of banning unacceptable speech is - over a long enough time frame.
My view is things might seem stable at the moment, but who's to say what the relevant timeframe is?
8chan's /pol/ is much larger than /leftypol/. I believe it's about tied with /v/, and those two are the largest boards. There are many basically innocent parts of 8chan, but /pol/ makes up a significant fraction of the site's activity, maybe as much as a third.
/pol/ is full of people who encourage shootings, and the website's and board's rules allow people to encourage shootings. You're not allowed to encourage shootings anywhere on Facebook, I think. That's a very significant difference between the two.
Jim Watkins owns a lot of things, including 2channel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel), a pig farm, and a VPS/VPN/webhosting provider. It's unlikely that those audiobooks are the biggest source of income.
> 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
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.
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...
> It would have more edge cases, and it would have to be enforced more consistently. It would be a lot more work
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.
It's still more work, because some people will get upset that they're not allowed to promote genocide. It still has edge cases (I've seen some hairy examples from Facebook moderation guidelines). It's also still more of a free speech issue than deleting spam is.
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
The closest such edge cases I found were mixups between enticement and reportage about Syrian war crimes and Rohingya genocide. What edge cases have you seen?
I don't mean banning racism, but enticement for violent action.
Guess what? The world is filled with imperfection.
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.
There is also the practical side to be considered. It is very easy to police spam with bots, and racism basically requires human intervention to recognize and moderate.
Some /pol/ members have committed acts of mass murder.
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)
Some U.S. citizens have committed acts of mass murder.
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.
Control of territory. Al Queda and/or their associates were effectively a government, while /pol/ can only wish for that sort of power.
(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.)
/pol/ is around five times as active as /leftypol/.
8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here.
Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.
That is an unfair characterization. /leftypol/ may be smaller than /pol/ but it is definitely one of the top 5 largest boards on the entire site (just checked and it is in 6th place right now by a narrow margin). It has a consistently high PPH count and tons of active users (500 right this minute).
It is hardly fair to say that the left doesn't make up a massive portion of the site.
/leftypol/ is insulated. Mentions of it on other boards are usually hostile.
Its existence tells you a lot about the consistency of the free speech policy, but it tells you little about the political leanings of other boards, particularly /pol/.
I think /leftypol/ is important but I don't think it's very relevant to a claim that /pol/ is populated by the extreme right, which seems to be the context here.
They're not treated the same, though. Using /pol/ is considered acceptable, but posting as if you're on /pol/ often isn't. Using /leftypol/ at all isn't considered acceptable.
What I was trying to push back against is that the overarching culture of the site is right-wing. I don't know that it is, and as someone who uses the site, I don't see that. I would love to hear a real argument for why this is the case. The boards on the site have their own internal owners and moderators and it is those people who are actually crafting the content moderation. There are christian boards, technology boards, literature and philosophy boards, sports boards, islamic theology boards, cyberpunk boards, I can go on and on.
To say that the place is nothing but right-wingers and that any other boards that aren't are anomalies, is unfair. Further it shows you have never actually looked at the site beyond the front page, if that. The overarching philosophy of the site is one of free speech, which attracts people who are interested in odd things from all corners, not just the right.
I didn't put it clearly, and not entirely correctly either. Sorry about that.
To the extent the site has an overarching culture, it's right-wing. There are boards outside the overarching culture (I said there were only "few" earlier, but I don't know if that's right).
/tech/ is the largest technology board. It's part of the overarching culture. It has a clear political leaning, even if that leaning is not part of the rules or the stated topic or the moderation policy. If you look at /tech/'s catalog, there's threads like "Stallman Going SJW on us?" and "Apple - FULL ON JEWMODE".
/christian/ has a /christian/pol sticky that encourages people from all parts of the political spectrum to post but seems to have primarily right-wing posters in practice.
/lit/'s second non-sticky is "Race Realism/biological determinism Books".
Not everyone on those boards is right-wing, of course. Being right-wing isn't their defining characteristic. And there are other boards that don't have this.
But boards with a politically neutral moderation policy that get cross-posters from other boards are likely to end up with a culture that's right-wing.
/leftypol/ is explicitly left-wing, so even its cross-posters are left-wing. Some smaller boards mainly get users through other means, so they're decoupled from the site culture. Non-English boards might be insulated as well, but I've never used any of the large ones so I can't tell.
Large swaths of the internet are left-leaning zones. It should be no surprise that places without algorithmic controls enforcing viewpoints are going to counter-balance what they could otherwise find on normal sites.
I won't say I didn't miss anything, but it seems that function is used for 3rd parties, and the real ip is still stored in the database anyway at least until deletion of a post
>poster_id is probably called with the hashed IP address.
But even if the database was wiped, as far as I can tell, poster_id still uses the old method posted below. So as long as the secure_trip_salt hasn't changed, which probably wouldn't unlike $hashSalt which was meant to rotate, and you could get the threadid and postid from a screenshot or archive, by running the range of ipv4 addresses through the function, you would get due to the uniformity property of sha-1, approximately 256 aliases of which one is from the poster.
So if I was the FBI and 8chan was not able to provide IP addresses, I would ask what the secure_trip_salt was and generate the table and match it to all the posts in that thread or at least the most significant ones, then trim down the matching IPs. After that I would query to isps or other entities who own or monitor the remaining IP addresses, and using the timestamp, get the identity of the person, if they weren't using a secure VPN that does not log and I could not deanonymize.
I think the method you describe for checking whether a post could have come from an IP address would work, if they gave up all the relevant salts. secure_trip_salt isn't supposed to change. hashSalt is also needed, because the IDs are generated using the hashed IP addresses, but it's changed infrequently from what I remember (changing it logs out all moderators because sessions are tied to IP addresses, so it's easy to notice).
Thanks for locating that line. I think between the two of us we've figured out all the relevant parts of the system and assessed what is going on with post ids and ips in the database.
At minimum, from my understanding, ipv4 addresses look 100% recoverable with the database and $hashSalt, and 3 upper octets recoverable as long as you have hashSalt, secure_trip_salt and an archive of the thread.
Of course this is just from the board software perspective, so the next layer in assessing the privacy of the users with regards to what the FBI can get, is the server, hosting, and upstream providers whether intentional or otherwise may have additional identifying information , for example cache or logs that can be correlated with the posts.
This is muddled by one particular incident with a video Trump posted. Searching the "democrats" phrase in quotes gives 160,000 results. Searching it with -trump -president gives only 4,000 results, and even then some (maybe most) of those results still seem to be about the incident (but spelling his name as "Dump" for example).
In my experience edgy calls for violence are indeed more common from the right than from the left, but this is a bad way to try to measure it.