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Milo Yiannopoulos Wants To Buy 4Chan, Promises Free Speech Haven (hollywoodreporter.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Hollywood Reporter:
Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right hero known for his banishment from Twitter, is preparing a bid to acquire his own social media firm: 4chan... The Hollywood Reporter learned that Yiannopoulos, with the help of a wealthy backer, is preparing to approach 4chan owner Hiroyuki Nishimura, a Japanese entrepreneur, with a bid this week. Contacted Saturday, Yiannopoulos confirmed plans for a possible acquisition but did not offer details.
"As a free-speech fundamentalist and a student of Internet culture, I appreciate how fragile and precious the 4chan ecosystem is and how much it gives to the wider Internet -- even if some corners of it, such as /pol/, don't always approve of me very much," Yiannopoulos said... "I spoke to my lawyer this morning about purchasing the business... I intend to approach the current owners in the next few days with an offer."
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
"As a free-speech fundamentalist and a student of Internet culture, I appreciate how fragile and precious the 4chan ecosystem is and how much it gives to the wider Internet -- even if some corners of it, such as /pol/, don't always approve of me very much," Yiannopoulos said... "I spoke to my lawyer this morning about purchasing the business... I intend to approach the current owners in the next few days with an offer."
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
PEPE
4chan is still a thing? how 20th century.
I'm not actually sure who I want in charge of the place less, him or Martin Shkreli.
I thought everyone had become weary of his "look at me, I'm a naughty, naughty boy" shtick.
Milo's all about freedom of speech. I don't know if he can keep the lights on at 4Chan, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to fuck it up the way an SJW would.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
sad that so called social media as they expand try to restrict speech to what is acceptable in a drawing room of bourgeois white women, and internet has to depend on a self described faggot troll to consciously create a truly free speech haven.
I feel this is the chance we need to finally break this like cuntsmear of a man
Everyone knows Japmoot just wants moar yen.
It would have to be literally free. Anyway, who needs the stupid thing... there are many alternatives and most of them are better. Let 4chan die and let the alternatives thrive.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I can wait the see the Slashbots clutch their pearls over this one.
If Twitter won't protect it, perhaps 4Chan will. #FreeMilo
FABULOUS!!!
WE LOVE YOU, YOU CRAZY FAGGOT!
'Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Preview'
I am not yelling... I am excited...
Captcha: endowed(Milo prefers big black dicks btw, just to let that white faggot know, the one who spams racist slurs)
"I spoke to my lawyer this morning about purchasing the business," said Yiannopoulos. "I intend to approach the current owners in the next few days with an offer. My philosophy as owner would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
I did a quick search of how 4Chan makes money and I don't see it. Meaning, if someone approached me about financing a purchase, I'd ask how I am going to get my returns.
Only if Microsoft Tay gets a permanent account.
While I disagree with Milo on many, many things, he seems to be committed to free speech above all.
Also he showed that he is able and willing to learn and change his oppinion when presented with new facts: There are famous tweets from him where he accused gamers of being immature, but a few month later he recanted and even tried to learn how to play Dota2.
On the other hand I fear that 4chan may turn out to be un-monetizeable. Most advertisers will never agree to show their ads there, not even on the worksafe boards, plus most 4chan users probably have an adblocker enabled anyway.
Whether you like 4chan or not (I don't, particularly), you have to agree that speech there has been pretty freewheeling. And that's perhaps 4chan's most redeeming feature, the one feature I wouldn't want to change. And Milo is, simply put, the best possible custodian of free speech. Whether you like Milo or not (I happen to like him, a lot (no, I'm not gay (but I have nothing against gay or any LGBT people, and am probably bisexual (this is a lot of nested parentheses, huh? But am keeping track, we're at number 4.)))) you must admit that there are few people as dedicated to free speech as he is.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
4chan is about as much of a 'social media firm' as the rumor grapevine in a prison is. It's like the bar in Mos Eisley but without the nice parts: scum and villanry, all day every day.
Right up to the moment someone reminds the angry white men how they're responsible for most of today's ills, whether rapes, mass shootings, extermination of species and people, child molestation and child rape and so on. Then suddenly it will be, "Shut them down! Facts don't belong here! SJW alert!"
If these angry white men are going to go on about how they've been the ones to create most of what we have, they also have to take the blame for the equal amount of the bad which have come along with it.
You can't have it both ways.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It would be nice if he could buy Twitter. Maybe this will make 4chan more popular.
Milo's is POS NAZI.
The two are made for each other. And seeing as how there is NO WAY to monetize the site it drain him dry. Great business move. What a tool....errr umm..troll.
If he owns 4chan, they can't ban him from it. Makes complete sense.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Al Gore once titled a movie of his "an inconvenient truth". The premise being that the truth can be isn't convenient, pretty or profitable. It's an argument that was widely embraced by the left when it was in there favor. Now that it is against their favor it is condemned (flashbacks of wikileaks anyone?).
Milo has previously stated that in today's society only trolls are allowed to speak the truth. This position used to be taken by the court jester or fool, the one person who could speak freely, to say what no one else dared. In today's society sites like 4chan have become the fool, saying what no one else dares.
4chan or it's replacement while always exist because history has always demanded that the truth be told, no matter how politically incorrect it is.
Let him do it! let it be a moneysink for him! let him go bankrupt! fuck that guy!
Yiannopoulos added this his philosophy as an owner "would be very simple: free-speech central, no ifs, no buts."
Let me know how that goes for you 5 seconds in when somebody posts child porn or makes a credible threat of violence.
Last time I checked, the government wasn't trying shut him or 4chan up/down. There isn't a need for a haven, he just wants a place for shitty people to be shitty people on the internet. Equating free speech with shitposting and demanding to be heard and respected demeans free speech and needs to stop! Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/
Rejoice...... :/
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
While we're on the subject, what are David Duke, Jared Taylor and the rest of their KK buddies up to? How about the USA neo-Nazi movement? Are they looking to buy a strip mall somewhere? How about the Bundy clan? Are they looking to build a new outhouse at their compound? Does Dylan Roof have a special someone he is prison pen-pals with now?
I'm really, really not down with /. reporting on hate group leaders like they are the Kardashians.
Picture this: Milo standing in front of Twitter Inc, yelling
"Oh, no room for Milo, huh? Fine! I'll go and buy my own microblogging service. With Blackjack! Aaaaand hookers!"
Then again, what'd he do with the hookers... Ahh, screw the whole thing!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Moot allowed several of his SJW buddies run the site, which led to the mass-banning of gamergate shit across the site.
They are the ones running the site now. Hiroyuki is barely in control of it.
This was made apparent very recently when mods were constantly deleting fine threads on boards to the point that large numbers got in touch with Hiroyuki, asking him to listen to them.
The mods are under current watch by him, suddenly fucking nothing from those mods.
The mods have tried to slowly erode the site for the past few years now.
Barely any of the older mods are even around now. All kicked out not that long before the whole SJW movement was secretly gaining momentum through blackmail and victim-playing.
I'm not one to defend the (new!) Anonymous movement. In fact, I fucking hated it.
Forced Anonymous took a nice, fun twisted anime-discussion / shitposting mostly pro-identity site and turned it a 180 to pro-Anonymous discussion srs bsns anti-identity site crap. The Habbo Hotel raid nonsense certainly never helped.
But even still, even after the site of 03-06 died and these actual children moved in, the site was still fine until 2010-11 when THEY (and that spineless moot) ruined the site. It has been shit ever since.
Collectively the largest communities left the site around those years and still are to this very day.
The only people left on 4chan are the truly hopeless ones, the few other remaining older yotsubites, shitposters, oh and now and Reddit / Tumblr / Twitter / 9gag.
Just let it die already, there is no reason to keep 4chan on life support anymore. Do the needful and just kill it.
If I can get a bit more theoretical here, a number of people have posted the Free Speech xkcd comic. It's absolutely right that there is a difference between 'the government won't arrest you' and 'no one should be compelled to host content they disagree with'. For this reason, I am indeed glad that Milo is keeping 4chan as a place where people can indeed post unpopular opinions.
However, I've been thinking about this recently: to what end is it not required for there to be a platform given? Twitter doesn't want to host offensive tweets. Fine. I'll join the four people on Google Plus and do it. Well, seems the other three people on Google Plus don't like my offensive speech, either.
Okay. I'll head on over to HostGator and install Friendica and make my own place where I can post my offensive things. Well, HostGator says I can't do that on their servers, rinse and repeat for GoDaddy, BlueHost, and 1&1. I head over to Amazon and rent some server time there, but Amazon says I can't post my offensive things there.
Fine, no more cloud for me - want something done right, DIY time. So, I call up Verizon and get their you-can-have-a-web-server FiOS package and load up an old desktop with a LAMP stack and host it myself. Verizon says they're not obligated to give me a platform, and when I call Cablevision, I get the same story. So, "no one is required to give me a platform" is, at its logical conclusion, a statement that can prevent a sufficiently offensive message from ever reaching the internet.
What is the reasonable expectation here? Should someone sufficiently down the line be expected to provide the same platform to hate speech as they provide to acceptable speech? Obviously I paint a picture of a fairly remote possibility, but it does raise the question of how "freedom of the press" works if no one will sell you a printing press.
Discuss.
The best way to defend against speech is to let people hear it and either ignore it or learn to argue against it. Free speech is essential for this reason, and if that was not the case the world and US would never have been able to improve. Not just science and technology, but overall social improvements. We would not have Government Welfare if not for people advocating an unpopular position, as one easy example.
What you are doing is attempting to claim that every person involved in a movement is responsible for every other single individual's actions and statements within the movement. If you want to play that game, do you believe that all people in BLM want to kill all cops, rob and vandalize all people with more money than they have (which is not much when you are not working), and kill all white people? I'm guessing that in that case because it's your side you would deny the over generalization, but yet you use that same over generalization with others.
Do you have any other double standards or hypocritical positions you would like me to explain to you?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That seems like a pretty stupid use of the shitload of money that's going to be required to buy this thing. Maybe he could just get therapy for his emotional problems with it and the world would end up a better place, instead of just perpetuating the self-congratulatory bullshit of the "Extreme free speech" community on 4chan.
But that would require the ability for introspection, which this cat clearly lacks. So never mind--buyout 4chan it is!
Who did what now?
I dislike the man quite a lot. But completely agree, there is no one else I know of that I would trust quite as much to keep/improve the free speech aspect of 4chan.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...because we were so far unable to hear unpopular things on the Internet, which is heavily censored.
From way over at the other end of the political spectrum, I don`t think the issues that Amy Goodman & co at ``Democracy Now`` like to follow are as well-covered by larger media outlets as they `should` be, but, I don`t imagine that CBS has other priorities because of some dark conspiracy; Amy`s fave topics just get lower ratings.
As for *COMMENTS* ... as for the notion that The People are unable to be heard for lack of a web site that lets them get their thoughts out for all to see...holy cow, I`ve been reading the most astonishing nonsense spewed by eccentrics and nuts onto the Internet since it was invented; I mean, 30 years since the first conspiracy-theory threads on USENET.
The notion that we NEED one more takes my breath away, like saying our society doesn`t have enough access to Big Macs; the notion that he can SELL one more in a saturated market - by perhaps being extra-friendly to some particularly objectionable bunch that have worn out their welcome elsewhere...that makes total sense.
The Left has gained such control over media, academia, and government that certain ideas were entirely banished from the public eye. This left us with "cuckservatives," or neoconservatives who believed in Leftist goals through conservative methods, as the only option to the Left. That option was not an alternative, so the Alternative Right arose.
Censorship can occur through many methods. It is not merely a legal term; it means disallowing your ideological opponents from expressing necessary ideas as a way of weakening them. Doxxing people, getting them fired from their jobs, and otherwise destroying their lives is a means of censorship. This is why anonymous internet forums like 4chan came about: people wanted to talk about these taboo things.
Milo is "alt lite," according to most, in that he is from the libertarian tradition of anarchy with free markets more than the Alt Right mainstream of opposing equality. He will be fair as an owner of a free speech site, as there is nothing on record showing him ever supporting censorship or trying to censor others.
Alternative Right.
We live in Leftist times, under governments dedicated to equality and diversity, and therefore Leftist views are uncontroversial and for that reason, perceived as "inoffensive."
It is the same thing as someone in the Soviet Union saying that they support the Party. Well, who doesn't? Vaclav Havel makes a good point with "The Power of the Powerless" on this topic, which is that people go along with the dominant paradigm out of fear, not agreement.
"No platform" is designed (per its origins with Antifa in the 70s) to eliminate the chance for ideological non-conformists to express themselves. It is entirely enforced with fear. No sane person should support it, because it creates a compulsory hive-mind which refuses to consider that it might not be entirely right in its assumptions.
Alternative Right.
Jared Taylor continues to write at American Renaissance, which is experiencing increasing popularity as people become dissatisfied with the Establishment Narrative.
Many are independent homelands through regional and local communities.
Alternative Right.
Our government actively shuts down speech it does not agree with.
And in Europe, government shuts down un-PC speech all the time. The new anti-troll policies are just part of the assault; these governments also collude with social media and raid the homes of people who say the "wrong" things.
Do you trust government to define what is true, and what is not, by censoring what they perceive to be untrue or "offensive"?
Alternative Right.
Control works by an obvious mechanism: define something necessary as taboo in order to force everyone to do what the controller intends.
Right now in the West, many topics -- diversity, sexual equality, democracy, socialism -- are protected by making criticism of them taboo.
A sensible middle position is to remove the taboo, and see what is actually true, and then act on that instead of the control mechanism.
Alternative Right.
Not to mention the long history of Leftist violence, including the French Revolution in which whole families -- men, women and children -- were sent to the guillotine, and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars which were designed to force all of Europe to be Leftist.
Ideologies do not change. They want total dominance and control. Censorship non-conforming speech is just one of the many methods they use toward that end.
Alternative Right.
Why would anyone want to buy cancer? 4chan is so 2005...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Free Speech _IS_ a blank check. Private organizations can say what ever they wish, just like people can say what they wish including people working in Government. If a company promotes bad policy they go out of business. If a person misrepresents the company, they can be terminated but still speak their piece. If a politician says things you don't like you vote for the alternative candidate and remove them from office. You can only get to those positions by actually listening to a side you may disagree with.
Your attempt to jump from free speech to libel demonstrates a complete lack of maturity and failure to comprehend "accountability". If I lie about you sure, I can and should be sued for lying. I stand up for my words and attempt to avoid dishonesty, but I can say what I like. You don't have to agree, and if I'm wrong prove me wrong. Do so in court and get a paycheck if the Judge believes you.
What you, and the Marxist/Progressive/Left attempt to do is criminalize and silence thoughts they dislike. You believe that thought and action must always coexist. Ever been mad enough to commit violence against someone? You may not have acted on it, but by your own definition you should be in jail for life because we all rationalize good and bad behavior. The difference between the criminals and everyone else is that the criminals act on the rationalization, most of us do not.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Damn, Milo. You sure abutt that?
Telling lies, repeatedly attacking critics and handing off attacks to his circle?
Well THAT "first amendment zone" will be dead on arrival!
4chan, where you are Free to Speak in a forum that governments and others have (rightfully?) associated with child pornographers and pedophiles. Where do I sign up- the Ministry Of Free Speech? Oh, so much chocolate this month, life on the internet just keeps getting better and better.
It will become just another forum for angry white people to complain that the election was rigged.
I'm just waiting for someone to point Watson at /b/.
Have gnu, will travel.
...protect the 1st Amd? Arrogant and conceited little ginger. Needs a lesson in manners.
the idea that a homo will save free speech from fags is awesome, it memberberrys me of that south park episode, being a homo is not a problem, being a faggot is, and it has nothing to do with sexuality at all
and very sad that 4chan is considered the last bastion of free speech on the fucking internet.
This will be a good thing.
The main new issue with the big social media sites is trend to "international" funding and new global ownership.
That offers international funders a say in comment policy forever changing US free speech foundations.
Why risk account closure or been reported per nation for further action by commenting on the news or any gov/mil/spy policy?
Free public comment on any topic is now been altered on huge once "free" US social media sites to avoid teams of the site's new global censorship teams.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
4chan is "precious"? That is over the top laughable.
This may be apocryphal, but Woody Allen have said something like: prostitution is not the world's oldest profession. They needed customers first. Beggars are the world's oldest profession.
Websites, internet chat rooms, and social networking also need 'customers.'
Anyway, I observed the following occur in my 4 favorites internet forums from circa 2000 to 2006. These were common interest/hobby sites. Three of the sites had very little constraints on speech, and minimal moderation. The TOS on the forth site included "play nice," "avoid politics and religion," and "posts should be "appropriate for people 14 years or older." Some of us joked at times that some of the moderators who were kinda like school marms, they were literally, mothers and parents of children, and at times would apply that last one as "should be appropriate for people 14 years and younger."
Note again that these were a hobby sites, not a politics or current events site.
Over those years the un and undermoderated sites all suffered badly from trolls, not nice speech, flame wars, personal attacks, etc. Site one was the premier internet forum for one hobby, and the forums on that site became moribund as people like me left. Site two broke into opposing warring camps, money was involved, and it became vicious. One side prevailed, but activity declined by a high percent as, again, people like me left. Site three had had it's up's and downs, similar wars and bad blood, cliques, and declined in status in the hobby.
The fourth more heavily moderated site has thrived and grown. It is the same hobby as the first site. The second site is a nitch. The third site saw some other sites on the same subject rise up. It used to be one of the top sites in it's field, now it is lower down, one of several.
I used to hate the moderation on the fourth site. Now I like it because I know I can go there and relax. I don't have to wade through bs, swearing (ahem), political bs, you know. I pretty much gave up on the other three.
Conclusion: A fair percent of the population likes internet sites where you interact with people in a courteous fashion. A fair, I would say a smaller but more vocal part of the population likes to get on the internet and fight it out, and sometimes fight dirty. Setting aside the censorship issue: if a lack of censorship leaves the doors opens to a few feisty or jerk members, you may find a large number of other people going elsewhere. Just like a brick and mortar store, bar, restaurant, public event. If brawls break out, most people will go elsewhere.
If brawls and boorish behavior continue on a site, many will crash and burn. It may still move on if it can attract enough sociopaths and psychopaths.
You know. Like Slashdot.
Rather than admit what an organization is, and who it is connected to today, you'd rather whine about its supposed origin. This just in, the parties as they existed decades ago DO NOT EXIST TODAY.