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The Washington Post Asks: Should 8chan Be Considered a Terrorist Recuiting Site? (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:
As most of the world condemned last week's mass shooting in New Zealand, a contrary story line emerged on 8chan, the online message board where the alleged shooter had announced the attack and urged others to continue the slaughter. "Who should i kill?" one anonymous poster wrote. "I have never been this happy," wrote another. "I am ready. I want to fight...." The persistence of the talk of violence on 8chan has led some experts to call for tougher actions by the world's governments, with some saying the site increasingly looks like the jihadi forums organized by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda...
8chan's founder, Fredrick Brennan, said Jim Watkins [8chan's sole administrator] owns other Internet businesses and has built a technical fortress to guard 8chan from potential takedowns: He owns nearly every component securing the site to the backbone of the Web, including its servers, which are scattered around the world. "You can send a complaint, but no one's going to do anything. He owns the whole operation," Brennan said. "It's how he keeps people confused and guessing...." Watkins is content to lose money, Brennan said, because he sees it as a pet project: "8chan is like a boat to Jim. It doesn't matter if it makes money. He just enjoys using it...."
8chan, however, is shielded in another way: the U.S. web-services giant Cloudflare, which helps websites guard against "distributed denial of service," or DDoS, attacks that online vigilante groups have used to target 8chan in the past.
The Post reports that Brennan "worries there are no true technical solutions beyond a total redesign of the Web, focused around identification and moderation, that could undermine it as a venue for free expression." Brennan tells the Post that "The Internet as a whole is not made to be censored. It was made to be resilient. And as long as there's a contingent of people who like this content, it will never go away."
On Tuesday, 8chan posted tips on Twitter for what to do "If your ISP is blocking a website you'd like to browse" -- a tweet which is now pinned to the top of its feed.
8chan's founder, Fredrick Brennan, said Jim Watkins [8chan's sole administrator] owns other Internet businesses and has built a technical fortress to guard 8chan from potential takedowns: He owns nearly every component securing the site to the backbone of the Web, including its servers, which are scattered around the world. "You can send a complaint, but no one's going to do anything. He owns the whole operation," Brennan said. "It's how he keeps people confused and guessing...." Watkins is content to lose money, Brennan said, because he sees it as a pet project: "8chan is like a boat to Jim. It doesn't matter if it makes money. He just enjoys using it...."
8chan, however, is shielded in another way: the U.S. web-services giant Cloudflare, which helps websites guard against "distributed denial of service," or DDoS, attacks that online vigilante groups have used to target 8chan in the past.
The Post reports that Brennan "worries there are no true technical solutions beyond a total redesign of the Web, focused around identification and moderation, that could undermine it as a venue for free expression." Brennan tells the Post that "The Internet as a whole is not made to be censored. It was made to be resilient. And as long as there's a contingent of people who like this content, it will never go away."
On Tuesday, 8chan posted tips on Twitter for what to do "If your ISP is blocking a website you'd like to browse" -- a tweet which is now pinned to the top of its feed.
See here.
For those that don't wanna bother with a long video, the article is about what the author calls "stochastic terrorism". Bruce Sterling touched on it in his novel "Distraction".
It works like a sales pipeline. You start out with PewDiePie spouting white supremacy "full the lulz" and for cheap publicity. A subset of his viewers "graduate" to harder stuff like Ben Shapiro and Sargon of Arkad, then on to Laura Southern and finally to stuff like the Unite the Right rally.
The New Zealand shooter ending his video with "subscribe to PewDiePie " because he's trying to put kids into that pipeline. Put a few hundred million in and eventually terrorists come out.
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No. Bezos has no editorial control over the Wash Post, no matter how badly you want to believe it because that's what you and your ilk would do in his position.
The answer to crazy conspiracy theories is not censorship. It is information.
We have more information than ever with positive information countering conspiracy theories in a shitload of supply. The problem is fundamentally that the information is not being absorbed. People see crazy shit at random and get sucked into that idea. They then seek out more information on it typically applying observer bias as they go. They then quickly get sucked into the echo chamber of stupidity.
Many minds are weak. It's not possible to solve this problem with information. If it were then conspiracy theories wouldn't gain traction in the first place.