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8chan Criticized By Its Founder, Blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs (marketwatch.com)
Several major ISPs in Australia temporarily blocked access to 8chan, along with "dozens" of web sites that hosted video of last week's mass shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, Ars Technica reports -- noting that the ISPs acted on their own in response to "community expectations."
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....
Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...
"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....
Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...
"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."
It is the solution...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...what's underground gets drudged back up into the open. In late 2014 discussions of run-of-the-mill internet drama regarding ideologues and he-said, she-said stories was unexpectedly banned from multiple websites, so it moved to 4chan. And then, in an unprecedented move, it was mass-banned from 4chan as well.
So, what happens then? The conversation doesn't stop; it moves to the venue which is least likely to inhibit it, which ended up being 8chan. The Streisand Effect was strong. As soon as it happened I knew that it'd be some kind of turning point.
All politics aside (jokes! I know that's impossible), the dynamics of crowds and movement on the internet seem to be something woefully misunderstood by the people who positioned themselves - through venture-capital funding and fuck-you money, I'd reckon - into power over moderation of the internet. Any long-time netizen could have predicted this would happen. Drama plays itself out in a matter of days or weeks if you don't take drastic steps to squelch it.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
The perp live-streamed the whole thing on Facebook, and yet FB has not been banned...
the only reason anyone can read your post but you is that /. is censoring the "Natalie Portman Hot Grits / Greased up Yoda Doll / GNAA" trolls. I can't be the only one old enough to remember the time before when /. was rendered useless by trolling efforts.
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free and anonymous connectivity is not the problem
When it comes to psychologically stable and educated individuals, this is correct. However, this is a significant contingent of humanity that is unstable and/or impressionable. With this segment of the population, free and anonymous connectivity can be weaponized to amplify their misinformation/disinformation. It can be used to rally people to focus their feelings of living an unfulfilling life on to a scapegoat.
Scapegoating has in fact been a highly successful engagement strategy for media outlets and politicians, which have in turn convinced many that education is elitist and to distrust experts thus further exacerbating the issue.
The question is really, how do we protect our society from those who would take advantage of these people?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Is this all that happens - people inciting violence are being silenced? I hear Jordan Peterson's had his invitation of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge University rescinded." I have seen quite some videos of JP but none advised violence. OTOH when a group of white boys from a catholic school has been doxed and received death threats everybody (at least most of media and political class) found this jolly good..I wonder why the discrepancy?
There is more - every time a person starts shouting in German 'alles machbar' there is nothing to see - it is usually a deed by a single disturbed person etc. Here we do not even know for sure who this guy in NZ was - he used language that could be seen as left wing radical, certainly eco-fashists (this is what he called himself) are green and left in my country. Yet we all have to wear headscarf as a sign of solidarity? I do not have anything to do with this guy even if I am a white man. I do not subscribe to acts of senseless violence against other people. I may have a different view when it comes to politicians - after all attempt to kill Adolf is celebrated in some places. What I mean is this: we have a lot of lunatics on the right wing side of political spectrum. We have significantly bigger group of lunatics on the left side however. Plus the violence loving radicals of religion of peace variety do have significant support in their communities - nobody seems to be addressing this issue. Or rather - some people do and get banned. Quite frankly I do not care about chan or whatever the site in question is called. I think however that erosion of our free speech rights have to be discussed. While we are at it we shall also discuss the spread of Marxist ideology in politics, media and academia and we can also touch the problems that love of violence among certain religious community causes.
If you want to block all sites that incite violence go ahead and do Please be consistent while doing so!
You 8chan edgelords who think death threats, racism, child porn, etc are the height of clever discourse can only blame yourselves for this. At some point, people will say, "enough" and just shut you the fuck down. So now you spoil things for the rest of us who believe in free speech.
You're deceiving yourself. You don't believe in freedom of speech. The kind of "freedom of speech" you advocate for is a curated, moderated, castrated one, only applying to approved or popular points of view. This is pretty much the opposite of freedom of speech.
The whole point of freedom of speech is to protect unpopular speech - and yes, this specifically includes politically sensitive, distasteful or loathsome subjects. Otherwise, you end up with Soviet Russia - which, by your definition, was a great place for freedom of speech: edgelords who thought talking about gulags, freedom, the evils of communism were the height of clever discourse could only blame themselves for being shut the fuck down (with extreme prejudice, in many cases). They only spoiled things for the rest of the Russians, who believed in communist free speech.