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

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

#111

Post by awesomerobot »

jmcgough wrote: post #74

I've been really surprised how influential /pol/ has been this election, which has been really weird and a little scary. It's not uncommon to post something on 4chan stating that you have inside information on events that are going to happen over the next few days (which is fiction 99.9% of the time). Posts like this in /pol/ have been getting screenshotted and spread elsewhere on the web, where alt-right conspiracy…

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

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

#112

Post by acqq »

rconti wrote: post #102
acqq wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was it really financed from the tax money of Europeans? If it was, I am really sad. Then the authors shouldn't be proud of such an "achievement." If it was generated by the 4chan regulars with their own money, then at least it's not worth discussing it more here...

It makes me sad that every time any kind of research is done, someone has to denigrate it as a waste of money. While I don't care about "chan" culture (never visited one of the sites, don't need that in my life), I fully support research into things I may or may not like. Let the Universities decide where to spend their research budgets. You never know what will come out of it.

This wasn't a real research (to really discover something) though (read some other comments here like typon's) except to "prove" how successful trolling is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12708090

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

#113

Post by rfrank »

gragas wrote: post #107
colordrops wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/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.

I was in the original thread and got screens of Combetta's history before he deleted it. I see /pol/ as one of the last bastions of political discussion that's not flooded with liberal propaganda, though that has been changing lately with CTR.

/pol/ is fast on a lot of international news that gets picked up slowly in the states too. they were on the us' accidental bombing of syrian troops last month [1] pretty much instantly.

1. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/18/did-the-u-s...

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

#114

Post by anothermoron »

gragas wrote: post #107
colordrops wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/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.

I was in the original thread and got screens of Combetta's history before he deleted it. I see /pol/ as one of the last bastions of political discussion that's not flooded with liberal propaganda, though that has been changing lately with CTR.

/r/politics is a fucking joke.

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

#115

Post by lake99 »

Figure 15 with heat map of hate speech per post puts India, Pakistan, Thailand, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and South Korea as the leaders of the pack. In my limited experience on /pol, this paints a very misleading picture. I hardly ever see people from these countries posting there. (See Figure 4.) They can't just leave the figure as-is, without further explanation.

The posters on 4chan (see dogma1138's post) are as surprised as I am that India features at all. To the contrary, India is commonly the target of scatological jokes.

Although they acknowledge the use of VPN, they might be downplaying its usage. Without making an effort to disambiguate that (with assistance from 4chan admins) I don't see the point of making charts based on countries. If not disambiguate, discarding posts by Tor and VPN users is easy enough.

I can't help but agree with the poster who wrote:

>>Although it is a bit absurd, /pol/ has, some

>>how, managed to place itself at the center of >world politics.

> i can't continue reading this, this is insane.

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

#116

Post by DarkLinkXXXX »

NotaSockPuppet8 wrote: post #64
bhaumik wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides memes and internet jokes, what are examples of high quality content created (or originating) from the "chan" culture?

/g/ makes useful software on occasion for example. after 4chan pioneered webm as looping gif replacement (long before imgur doing the gifv thing) they made webmcam and webm4retards for example. The latter by its mere existence also highlighted github's overzealous application of community policies. A bunch of indie games started their life there too. And then there are derivative and mashup works like fanart, transla…

Actually, 8chan had webm embeds before 4chan (and with a higher size limit). They were first AFAIK, but maybe some smaller chan did it sooner.

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

#117

Post by astrodust »

douche wrote: post #39
dogma1138 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rare Pepe is the "name" of the meme as far as the subject specific custom pepe images/shops go. But I still can't believe that there is a research paper out there where there is a section which describes the researcher's "collection" of rare pepe memes with visual aide samples.

I can't believe that a presidential candidate prominently featured a page on their website attacking a stupid internet meme. I think the Aztecs fudged their calculations somehow, and it was really supposed to be 2016...

We though they were speaking to us in code, but really it was just emoji.

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

#118

Post by astrodust »

AvenueIngres wrote: post #97
cryoshon wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source? if true, this would be a troubling precedent in the use of third party analysis in conducting military operations

I occasionally lurk on 4chan (in particular /sg/ since they aggregate lots of data regarding the Syrian civil war) and I witnessed this one particular event first hand. Now I understand that this is not a verifiable source but I found this as well, that sums-up the whole thing: http://2static.fjcdn.com/pictures/4chan+pol+sg+orders+an+air... I don't think you will be able to find anything better than that to "prove" i…

Giving military "intel" from 4chan is absolutely insane. These were the same people that thought they'd conclusively identified the Boston Marathon bomber, but were totally wrong.

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

#119

Post by astrodust »

3dk wrote: post #59
Joeboy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you (or somebody) explain this? It sounds interesting but I don't understand exactly what that sentence means.

Here you go: http://imgur.com/gallery/5P1N1GI Summary: 4 chan users identified a training site of ISIS and pinpointed it on google maps. One of the users knows a friend of the Russian Minister of Defense and sent him the information, resulting in an air strike.

This is disturbing to say the least. Which group of "rebels" is this? There's a lot of factions here in play, some of which are downright scary, but others of which are just fighting to survive.

Not that 4chan cares about these things. They just want to see people blown up.

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

#120

Post by niftich »

astrodust wrote: post #118
AvenueIngres wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally lurk on 4chan (in particular /sg/ since they aggregate lots of data regarding the Syrian civil war) and I witnessed this one particular event first hand. Now I understand that this is not a verifiable source but I found this as well, that sums-up the whole thing: http://2static.fjcdn.com/pictures/4chan+pol+sg+orders+an+air... I don't think you will be able to find anything better than that to "prove" i…

Giving military "intel" from 4chan is absolutely insane. These were the same people that thought they'd conclusively identified the Boston Marathon bomber, but were totally wrong.

I'm pretty sure that was Reddit [1]

[1] http://wayback.archive-it.org/3649/20130422194045/http://www...

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