Perpetrators of recent far-right terrorist attacks have been connected to similar forums. The shooter in the March massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, had spent time on 8chan, one of 4chan's even more vitriolic offshoots.
In his racist manifesto, he used coded white nationalist language found on both platforms. A man who attacked a synagogue in Poway, California , in April, also spent time on 8chan. Both wrote on message boards about their deadly plans and were encouraged by users there to carry them out.
Users developed 8chan and neinchan, more radical variants of the original, in response to perceived censorship. But bigotry is rampant on 4chan as well. On that platform, hate speech is present in one out of every 15 comments, exceeding the volume on other, openly racist websites.
Users frequently celebrate violence against minorities and far-right terrorists. Former users reported that exposure to the language, memes, and videos on the site desensitized them to hateful language and bloodshed, even in their offline lives.
The findings raise questions about free speech, terrorism, and the policing of online extremism. Read more: Military revenge porn is thriving on anonymous servers and image boards. But researchers believe that 8- and neinchan contain even more extreme white supremacist content than 4chan.
None of the chan sites can be easily shut down because they operate under uncertain ownership and can easily switch to different servers if a company refuses to host their content. There haven't, however, been reported attempts by governments to do so — although there has been some debate over whether shutting down the chans could drive extremists even further off the grid.
A teenage programmer launched 4chan in as a venue to nerd out on anime, but it quickly spiraled out of control. These days, 4chan is still home to mundane discussions about comics and news. But it is also a cesspool of hate.
Because 4chan users often employ alternative terms to substitute for racial slurs, these numbers almost certainly underestimate the true frequency of hate speech on the site. Posters can utilize a variety of misspellings, dog whistles, and coded language to refer to certain races or ethnicities. Sometimes the text included a direct threat of violence toward a minority group; in other cases, the writer implied that a racial minority was committing or would commit violence against white people, a common white supremacist trope.
Sometimes posters made threats indirectly, speculating about what groups would next be terrorized, bombed, or shot. Other comments are more ideological, regurgitating Nazi slogans or making glowing references to white supremacist groups. Read more: How a small Budapest publishing house is quietly fueling far-right extremism.
The rise in that language began in the summer of , increasing in tandem with the presidential election and only beginning to abate in They appear in about one in every comments. Even as 4chan has grown more extreme, overall web traffic on the site has more than doubled in the last decade. Visits to the site peaked in early and have fallen significantly since, but 4chan remains one of the thousand most popular sites worldwide.
The real-world effect of exposure to the large amounts of violent, hateful, and white supremacist speech on 4chan and its sister sites is largely unknown. It was a central part of the online support for Donald Trump in the US election.
But it is also a place where users organise campaigns of abuse and trolling on other websites. While 4chan is increasingly reported on by mainstream media , we know little about how it actually operates and how instrumental it is in spreading hate on other social platforms. One is its aggressive and racist tone, and use of offensive and derogatory language. This characterises its links to the alt-right movement, which rejects mainstream conservatism as well as immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness.
The other interesting characteristic is the substantial amount of original content and online culture it generates. Raids are somewhat similar to distributed denial of service DDoS attacks used by hackers to bring down websites.
But its effect beyond 4chan itself was actually quite limited and less prevalent than was reported at the time. We then explored raiding behaviour on other social media platforms.
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