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‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

nytimes.com

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#22
post #19

It’s a distasteful site but I think it should stay. No speech should be silenced.

Historically very little speech could be made without social consequences, the internet broke that paradigm

I think these two posts just about sum up the state of things and our disagreements at this time in history as succinctly as I could imagine.

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#23
post #4

So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? And what about the people posting they are about to “go kill as many brown people as they can find and they plan on being dead by the end of the day?” It’s a felony terroristic threat. How about we just arrest everyone posting terroristic threats before they can do this kind of damage? 8Chan, or whatever public forum these discussions are oc…

Would you expect the FBI to investigate every moronic shitpost on every social media outlet?

I think you're setting the bar too high. That's a lot of effort, a lot of resources, for something that can be solved in other ways (ie. controlled access to devices with the potential for mass murder).

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#24
post #4

So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? And what about the people posting they are about to “go kill as many brown people as they can find and they plan on being dead by the end of the day?” It’s a felony terroristic threat. How about we just arrest everyone posting terroristic threats before they can do this kind of damage? 8Chan, or whatever public forum these discussions are oc…

NYT's "The Daily" podcast discussed this a little over a year ago in response to the Parkland shooting, and I found it to be quite insightful. I believe it was this episode, but I could be wrong[0]. A major factor impeding law enforcement is the sheer number of people posting violent threats on social media. I can't remember the statistic, but they mentioned that the US justice system basically wouldn't be able to ef…

They don't need to process all of them, just a relatively small number of public examples.

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#25
post #4

So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? And what about the people posting they are about to “go kill as many brown people as they can find and they plan on being dead by the end of the day?” It’s a felony terroristic threat. How about we just arrest everyone posting terroristic threats before they can do this kind of damage? 8Chan, or whatever public forum these discussions are oc…

>I keep reading about blimps watching us 24/7, license plate readers tracking everywhere we drive. It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. There are checks in place and warrants needed for this. If you see something illegal online you could report it to the FBI perhaps?

The data is gathered but it's so much that any signal is drowned in noise. You either spend billions investigating hundreds of thousands of idiots spewing shit on the Internet or you miss "that one." There is no middle really.

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always possible that many sites were candidates given their traits. And one in a semi random manner became it.

Isn’t the story that all this crap was on 4chan, and then 8chan was created because 4chan started cracking down on this kinda stuff. It may be argued that 4chan’s existence gave a home to this crap, or that it created it. Hard to know one way or another.

4chan didn't create it, 4chan was created for speech that wasn't allowed on somethingawful, and before that there was ogrish and before that rotten.com & stileproject, before that? Probably alt.tasteless.

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I keep reading about blimps watching us 24/7, license plate readers tracking everywhere we drive. It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. There are checks in place and warrants needed for this. If you see something illegal online you could report it to the FBI perhaps?

> It's almost as if this "surveillance state" you all imagine doesn't exist. How do you imagine that billing for EZ Pass and license plate scanners works?

EZ-Pass is RFID based, it doesn't use license plate scanning but a transponder you have to have in your car (typically it's affixed to the windshield, but it doesn't need be)

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#28
post #4

So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right? And what about the people posting they are about to “go kill as many brown people as they can find and they plan on being dead by the end of the day?” It’s a felony terroristic threat. How about we just arrest everyone posting terroristic threats before they can do this kind of damage? 8Chan, or whatever public forum these discussions are oc…

>So literally everyone so much as reading 8chan/pol is on a watchlist, right?

Well, crap. When I heard the news I decided to pay 8chan a visit (never really been there before) to see how they took the news(not surprisingly, not well). I really hope I am not on a list because of this.

Re: ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says 8chan’s Creator

#30
post #14
post #7

What exactly makes 8chan the preferred platform for this kind of stuff, and not other websites? Genuinely curious, is it just because it’s unmoderated?

I think this is the reason (from TFA): >The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of GamerGate — a loose reactionary collection of anti-feminist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan. Since GamerGate, 8chan has become a catchall website for internet-based communities whose behavior gets them evicted from more mainstream sites.

That and Voat. Voat is almost as bad in a lot of ways
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