A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

I speculate that the ban on raids had a much bigger impact. Before that they were used for all kinds of things, mostly to cause mischief, occasionally even for a good purpose, e.g. op chanology. So this might have tied up and channeled a lot of the mischievous energy of the more active users. Now that it's banned we get more informal, less organized hit-and-run harassment.

Posts linking their replies in the header has been a feature for a very, very long time. This doesn't have the negative impact you think it does. It's not a post rating system, and only trolls and candyasses pay attention to the number of replies on your post.

There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community. It may not seem that way, but the stupidest people are often the loudest.

Interestingly, Facebook's algorithms also reward activity which has the effect of bubbling up group posts with a lot of drama.

The addition of flags probably do far more damage to /pol/. Too much meta discussion or just insults based on the flag of the poster.

No, it's disappointing that 4ch is getting any attention, because attention has always been the cancer that is killing X. I suppose network effects can also work against you...

This sentence -- not to mention the rare pepe collection at the end -- made me pause a bit and wonder if the paper isn't a particularly elaborate chan troll. Clearly "rare pepe" is a chan in-joke.

The best is Footnote 2: "For readers unfamiliar with memes, we suggest a review of the documentary available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ ."

Remember that arXiv is just pre-print and the last page if not the entire paper is probably nothing more than a lame/distasteful joke. Remember that any nutbag who knows a little English and LaTeX can publish on arXiv. It will likely not make it into a journal.

In the words of one /pol/ poster:

"/pol/ is winning because it's funnier than the people that despise it, it's that simple. Being authoritarian isn't funny. Tumblr, leddit, they're funny like a commercial is funny, they can be clever, they can be witty, but they'll never be gut-laugh, -holy shit- funny, because they never confront anything they're not supposed to, they never color outside the lines. They talk like they're resisting something, but all they do is agree with each other. They slay the sacred cows they've been conditioned to hate, and they ignore the elephants in the room they're conditioned not to see, and they'll always be like that because they're clever, educated pussies.

/pol/ is full of angry racist conspiracy theorists, but it's fucking hilarious. /pol/ might not always tell you the truth, but it will tell you the closest thing to an honest truth it can see, and it will laugh at you for being offended by it. The fact that /pol/ is starting to influence 4chan in general means that the sacred cows we're slaying are actually sacred, and people are laughing in spite of themselves. It's stupid and weird and it's too simplistic and old-fashioned to be true, but you're laughing anyways.

That's how it begins."

Indeed a couple of posts made in the last few months have been prescient of serious and highly secretive information. The motivation behind such posters is likely explained below.

I think what a lot of people don't get about /pol/'s influence in the last year is it's mechanism. It is easy to browse the site as an outsider and think it is just shitposting 9000, with no real influence outside. However /pol/ unconsciously and without formal direction has an extremely effective strategy for disseminating information.

Once the essence of some information has been distilled users start disseminating it to the 'normies' via Reddit and Twitter. Twitter is where the real influence comes as they inevitably target journalists in large numbers. As most know, journalists and politicians are extremely engaged in Twitter. Stories frequently then cross the barrier into the mainstream.

Targeting of journalists and politicians, largely but not always via Twitter, is where most of the huge power is derived. People targeted don't necessarily have the internet experience to realise when these things are directed. A lot of what most of them see is a flurry of regular public concern which needs to be addressed.

When a story from /pol/ reaches the mainstream, it goes into a glorious frenzy. It is a powerful feeling when something you have created/discovered and disseminated in a 4chan thread becomes international news because of the boards collective action.

Summarised: when a very large group of people with political leanings on a story/topic informally organise, the effort can take the view mainstream. important to note is the demographic includes a diverse group of users who are highly skilled in programming, social media and politics.

edit: If I was a highly placed politician and wanted to disseminate secret information without attribution, I would run it through the tumbler that is 4chan.

/pol/ uncovered the Paul Combetta posts on Reddit. So it's not all bullshit. Its crazy that they had enough of an effect to get the head of the FBI grilled by a house committee.

It's fascinating to see how feasible it is to get something — anything — recognized as fact or actual trend by employing social media and excitable media. The 'bikini bridge' phenomenon comes to mind.

That's kind of the crux of 4chan — you can't take it seriously, but it's very serious.

Most average people don't even know what a 'chan' is or even know what 4chan is all about, except for the times it gets demonized by the media. And it becomes just associated with something sensational and negative.

The higher ideal: the philosophical context of freedom through anonymity resulting in great creativity is completely drowned out by the petty stuff.

There's a reason it creates a major portion of culture,memes, and ideas on the internet. It's one of the few places unimpenged by materialism or status or th ability of your boss to find your account. This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think thats a beautiful thing.

All the chans have pretty different culture. For example, 8chan seems to have a higher rate of reddit cross-posting. Lainchan, as another example, is meant to be closer to older 4chan culture and has very few users who are "new" to chans.

I was recently working on a project to identify pepes in images and dumped a bunch of images from the /r9k/ archive using the 4chan API.

If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset for supervised learning, be aware that labeling the images is not a task for the faint of heart.

When you browse an image board, you will have an implicit image filter: you will probably only open threads that interest you and that have been alive for a while. That does not hold for an image dump of all threads.

Some of the replies to the thread show mistakes in the paper.

For example, Zimbabwe is marked as very active and very hateful. But it's probably just people with a VPN: doing that to get a "controversial" or "funny" country flag is a thing.

/thread

Two people collected the data, two did the analysis and wrote the paper, three helped a bit, one got the grant which funded the lab. Or something similar.

The incentives for giving credit to everyone who participated even a bit are quite strong: in most academic disciplines you get more than an eighth of a paper's worth of 'credit' for an eight-author paper.

From my experiences in astrophysics: Second author is supervisor, third, fourth, etc. are previous collaborators of supervisor that somehow have some 'moral' claim to supervisor's work because it remotely thematically touches upon previous work they did, and thus have provided 'inspiration' for the current work. It's a racket ;)

Four people to study /pol/ in depth, and four people to be the trauma therapists keeping them sane.

It's quite popular in the NGO/SJW world to do informal "manus manum lavat" deals to gain credibility: you help us with our current campaign, we put your name on our future publications.

Well, somehow that tax payer money has to be put to use. I love the rare Pepe collection at the end of this paper.

One per chan.

If you are in the US, keep in mind that those countries are in distant timezones. Because 4chan threads are so ephemeral, they could have entire threads to themselves while you are asleep and you wouldn't notice.

"Hate" is really not the right word in this context, as a lot of them are thrown around casually. Not necessarily due to deep-seated hatred but simply because it is not politically correct to use the words. To gain a sense of being contrarian to the mainstream, to titillate, to watch the reactions of those offended.

For example the "-fag" suffix is applied to everything and practically synonymous with "-person". A namefag is someone who uses a username instead of remaining anonymous. A drawfag is someone who creates original art, it has a positive connotation.

Even when discussing unfair monetary things the term kikes (jews) might be thrown around, just due to the historic association of jews with banking. Even users who present left-leaning positions (e.g. on renewable energy, healthcare or defense spending) use those terms because the associated concepts are ingrained in the conversation structure.

I don't know about /pol/, but other boards use "my nigger" or humorous variations thereof as an expression of endorsement

Use of the words might correlate with the sentiment of the user, but the correlation may be weaker than expected.

Richard Spencer once said that politics to culture is mist to a lake. You cannot have politics without having culture. IRL actions are not gonna do squat (see: ows, arab spring) without cultural shifts. What pol is doing is more insidious in effect: it is shifting the culture that will enable the politics. If 4chan reach in memes is wide, as internet history has shown, and if the memes from pol become sentiments embraced by others outside of it, pol is creating the lake for whatever mist.

To change politics, it requires a cultural change. Tumblr is another place on the internet that is a space for cultural change, albeit the opposite kind.

You know a 'lot'(!) of researchers who avoid 4chan? What exactly would they be researching or avoiding to research?

They don't want the world to know where they live? /pol/ is a board of peace tho

Every board in 4chan has it's amount of shitposting. One thing you start developing, as a user, is an semiconscious filter and ways to process the information.

A *chan site has many layers a user must go through to finally fing a decent discussion (or the epic lulz). You have an outdated confusing UI, the sheer amount of useless content, the lingo and the highly offensive content.

After you learn to process and filter all that, you start finding the really good stuff. Or, as I like to say, "Gold floats on shit. You just have to be brave and reach it"

There was that one time when posters from the Syria general thread helped by looking up images on google earth and had an artillery strike directed.

I still remember when moot first created [s4s] a lot of people say that it can be a reset to the old chan culture.

I think the money was totally worth it, just for the fun we all had. It's a lot of people having fun.

Although maybe the people who don't know about this (thus couldn't have fun) shouldn't have paid for it :\