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The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

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Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#61

Post by cheweh »

pwinnski wrote: post #48
jmnicolas wrote: post #3

Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. I'm not from the US, the only mentions of those sites I have ever encountered was journalists making a few articles about them.

I think this line of thinking is absolutely correct when conspiracy theories are fringe or harmless. You don't believe we landed on the moon? Okay, buddy, have a nice day. Occasionally, though, conspiracy theorists escape the harmless fringe and become actively harmful to society, which is what many of us believe is happening in the USA today. A racist conspiracy theory that posited, contrary to all evidence, that ou…

Note that Obama's birth was a conspiracy around 2008, before 8chan existed. I would argue that "the Donald" on reddit was a driver of Trump's online popularity. This argument is not for striking down individual websites as much as it is for pervasive rumor-quashing.

One could look toward China's internet policy to measure the success of playing "whack-a-mole" at the rumor-level. Propaganda there still gets made and spread, it just stays online for minutes at a time before deletion, and so by the time people see it they have no way of asking for clarification on its truth.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#62

Post by mhoad »

commandlinefan wrote: post #56
bogwog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many Qanon believers are hate-filed extremists, people going through mental health issues, or just edgy kids/teenagers. I doubt that the people who would actually commit a public shooting are in the majority, and I strongly doubt that taking down their website is going to kill the group. If anything, it will just strengthen the beliefs of the paranoid people who frequent it. What we should be doing is go…

> going after Youtube So... actual government-mandated suppression of free speech?

Allow me to reframe this. Considering they are both now considered groups posing a terrorism threat according to the FBI we would hold a platform like YouTube to the same standard on QAnon that we do on ISIS.

You can’t host propaganda from either group because they both have an extremely high likelihood of leading to real world violence based on historical evidence.

That isn’t an unreasonable standard.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#63

Post by ufmace »

ibejoeb wrote: post #57
logicchains wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how skeptical people are of the idea of a paedophile ring among the elites when only recently Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for running one (and mysteriously died in custody).

This is what I don't understand about qanon, which I assume is because what I know of qanon is only this surface-level premise. Where does it go off the rails? Because--if we're being real with ourselves--we have to contend with the fact there is a pedophile island, and heads of state, royals, and other elite are credibly implicated the sex trafficking that sustains it.

AIUI, the key part of QAnon is "the storm", the idea that some secretive group in the Trump administration is preparing some kind of mass indictments, possibly involving military tribunals, to bust all of the secret pedophiles. This is "the plan" that QAnon people implore us to "trust". No matter how bizarre and disconnected the happenings in various Government agencies seem, it's all supposedly part of "the plan" that we're supposed to just trust.

Pedophile rings in the highest levels of Government and high society seem disturbingly plausible. I have no idea who's connected to it or how it all works, but I bet we'd all be pretty disturbed if it ever really came to light. But I'm not about to buy that there's a secret plan that's going to make it all work out, and everything is actually happening according to that plan.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#64

Post by motohagiography »

leftyted wrote: post #44
motohagiography wrote: post #31

It's an interesting find. The difference between these sites and spam sites is that they are mostly self-contained comment boards. You have to actually go do them to interact with them, where spammers were breaking the internet. What clicked for me in this article is asking why I ever thought the internet was about ideas, what it might have meant pre-internet for people to be free of a "mainstream" in the old music a…

> Internet trolls use the higher bar for entry of tech focused platforms to harass people who are competing in the desperate political struggle for approval that is mainstream social media. Conversely, this mainstream culture is also the source of the visceral disgust some people have for lawyers, journalists, activists, and other people who affect being underdogs so they aren't held to the standards of honest people…

Thanks, her whole thing on private/public is something I'd like to read next, as I have a hypothesis that there is a thread of continuity between the collapse of the Private and the scale of cruelty in the 20th century. These conflicts about chans and censorship and conspiracy theories are artifacts of categories I think we've all seen before.

I'd agree that truth in public is as welcome as truth to power, perhaps because they are related. The point of a separate public is to keep the ball in the air so we can coexist under conventions and merciful pretenses, whereas when it becomes overpowering and breaches the private sphere, it's just Hobbes' war of all against all.

Feminist critiques I read at school back in the day about the Private sphere as the origin of patriarchy bring the division into a modern context. If we imagine the current trend in global internet culture as an extension of that revolt against the private sphere, it yields some uncomfortable questions about what the endgame looks like if that animus swings out of balance. Hence, I see a lot of the crazy online stuff as people expressing their instincts for what's going on and what they fear is going to happen to them, but they don't have the critical tools or the privacy to develop and articulate them.

HN provides the closest thing we have to an elevated semi-private discourse to raise this stuff.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#65

Post by dhimes »

strathmeyer wrote: post #32
swebs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you go into more detail?

8chan was created when 4chan disallowed child pornography and their owner bought it when all this QAnon stuff started.

Would downvoters please explain why you're doing it? Is this statement untrue? Serious question- I have no idea.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#66

Post by drcongo »

bogwog wrote: post #30
jameskilton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. Please do a little more research and thought before posting such things. There is no "trash can", it IS SPILLING EVERYWHERE. We even have a QAnon supporter most likely headed to Congress. People are dead because of these hate-filled groups. Shutting them down saves lives , not only in the US but throughout the world. You can't just "leave these…

I wonder how many Qanon believers are hate-filed extremists, people going through mental health issues, or just edgy kids/teenagers. I doubt that the people who would actually commit a public shooting are in the majority, and I strongly doubt that taking down their website is going to kill the group. If anything, it will just strengthen the beliefs of the paranoid people who frequent it. What we should be doing is go…

Qanon believers are, by definition, people with mental health problems.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#67

Post by Camas »

bleepblorp wrote: post #51
jmnicolas wrote: post #3

Of course everybody knows the right way to convince conspiracy theorists that they're wrong is to go after them. I don't see what's wrong with having internet trash bins. At least the trash is in a know location, it doesn't spill everywhere. I'm not from the US, the only mentions of those sites I have ever encountered was journalists making a few articles about them.

QAnon material has been retweeted by Trump and a QAnon-connected person is expected to be elected to the US congress. A QAnon believer was convicted for blocking a major dam while making terroristic threats[0]. Another believer was arrested for attempting to bomb a religious display in Illinois. [3] A believer in the QAnon predecessor, Pizzagate, shot up a pizza restaurant[1]. The recent attempt to assassinate the Ca…

Article doesn't mention any bomb and "shot up" is stretching things.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#68

Post by dhimes »

tzs wrote: post #52
0xy wrote: post #17

The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate. This move will serve to push these movements underground to Tor or other uncensorable networks where they're even harder to monitor. It also sends a message to them that they're on to something (because if the QAnon conspiracy was real, the "deep state" would indeed try to snuff it out). I feel like this is such a bad precedent…

> The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate. Have you actually tried that? I have. I spent quite a while when I was in law school on some Usenet groups where tax conspiracy theorists hung out, thoroughly refuting their arguments (it was a good way for me to practice legal research). The problem was that the people who were coming up with the totally false but believable…

Yes, debate doesn't seem to work very well. The "persuaders" just pivot to another nonsense claim, and you waste a ton of time debunking it.

It has to start with public culture. People should be a little embarrassed to be wrong; they should strive to be right. They should demand evidence.

We're losing that. The rise of anti-intellectualism is allowing this fungus to grow and spread.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#69

Post by bleepblorp »

Camas wrote: post #67
bleepblorp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QAnon material has been retweeted by Trump and a QAnon-connected person is expected to be elected to the US congress. A QAnon believer was convicted for blocking a major dam while making terroristic threats[0]. Another believer was arrested for attempting to bomb a religious display in Illinois. [3] A believer in the QAnon predecessor, Pizzagate, shot up a pizza restaurant[1]. The recent attempt to assassinate the Ca…

Article doesn't mention any bomb and "shot up" is stretching things.

Updated. The QAnon bomber was, indeed, a different incident in Illinois. The Hoover Dam incident only involved firearms and an armored vehicle.

And what term other than 'shot up' would you use to describe a deranged person recklessly discharging a firearm as part of a targeted attack?

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#70

Post by MrMan »

commandlinefan wrote: post #56
bogwog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many Qanon believers are hate-filed extremists, people going through mental health issues, or just edgy kids/teenagers. I doubt that the people who would actually commit a public shooting are in the majority, and I strongly doubt that taking down their website is going to kill the group. If anything, it will just strengthen the beliefs of the paranoid people who frequent it. What we should be doing is go…

> going after Youtube So... actual government-mandated suppression of free speech?

when I was growing up, genocide is not free speech, war is not free speech
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