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The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

krebsonsecurity.com

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

#221
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …drink the blood of children This is an echo of another conspiracy theory, that culminated in its heyday into a world war.

Exactly. There are limits to the crazy. In moderation, giving people an outlet for frustration is fine. UFO abduction, all that stuff. But when the crazy gets weaponized for the benefit of actual policy actors, which is what has clearly happened here, we need to start getting it under control. It's not that Q and adrenochrome and pizzagate and birtherism and even the The Protocols are that dangerous per se . It's tha…

And social media in the past decade has enabled lateral communication channels to mobilise the crazy mobs. Now you don't need to convince the journalists to get your drivel through out. You don't even have to be in the same country at all.

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

#222
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

There's a fair bit of back and forth on it, here's wiki to start it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sphere Most of the criticisms of the ideas of the public/private sphere root back to Aristotle, and unfortunately, Google has elevated more recent, post Marx criticisms of it (imo) since setting it up as an evil is the basis of popular current cultural theory, but it's a foundational concept that predates the vi…

I was responding to this:

> The private sphere -- family, close friends, personal intimacy, etc -- is where people are at their best. We can be honest there. We can show weakness, we can apologize, we can compromise and we can forgive.

It family where publicly charizmatic people stop trying to be charizmatic and start being abusive. Also, it is not rare, both private part and abuse part went up during lockdowns.

Aristotle and Marx have zero to do with it and the way people on HN bring super old classics in completely unrelated context is getting obnoxious.

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

#223

I have to say that I find the amount of effort that's put into silencing these particular weirdos scary - and it's also deeply hypocritical because conspiracy theorists are being shushed down for believing in imaginary and impossible to prove things, while say religious and supernatural folks are free to promote their ideas freely, although they share many of the same elements, and historically have caused much more…

For things to be said here.

First, Ben Bagdikian's media monopoly highlights how we now have very concentrated media companies and almost every company that calls itself "the mainstream media" is actually part of 4 or 5 companies that are I think are best deemed an oligopoly of influence brokers in the US. Much of the reason those companies have been targeting the current incumbent president for the past 4 years with a ferver that the Bushes, Clinton, or Obama never were attacked with is largely because when a rich person is threatened with losing their money, they'll simply spend it all to stop it from being taken away. Great example of how that works is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGIYU2Xznb4

(This is older, we're down to 5 now). https://producertales.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mediamogul...

Second, you make more money as a "news" org if you foster an unquestioning, guillable audience that doesn't question what you're putting forward much. Hence, the use of naming and shaming, guilt tripping, heckling and otherwise berating their own audience through innuendo and sleight of hand. The MSM has repeatedly crossed the line in the last year of attempting to incite their audience to violence. A great majority of americans at this point, by polls, consider those orgs to be trash news and tabloids; what these large news orgs are attempting to do is to stop competition from taking root. Some of that is supported by the US Government; psyops are a real thing and having media control is an effective means to stopping them. Much of that is revenue assurance. The problem today is, people are turning off the TV and Cable news broadcasts and are going to 3rd parties because they've gotten wise to big media pissing in the soup.

Finally, 8chan has been, for a long long time, targeted by social engineering groups including spooks from the US government. The internet has this funny issue where unregulated, anonymous boards tend to get targeted by social engineering threat groups in foreign governments and that has been pretty well documented. Even HN gets targeted. The problem with psychological warfare is, much like any WMD, it doesn't differentiate between target or target audiences, and as a spook org, you have no idea who really uses 4chan or 8chan. So you end up with these platforms being used to attract and radicalize certain broad audiences, then SHTF such as e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, the courts and governments are left to pick up the pieces and save face.

Pretty much at this point there's no more face to save, and the burden of proof is now a hell of a lot higher for audiences going forward. The game of building trust in an org then using people is prooving less and less effective.

Krebs did an excellent job at following the money down on what looks like a fairly sophisticated psyop. Interesting to me he'd do that.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Destroying people with facts and logic" isn't how human psychology works Completely agree that this isn't how human psychology works. However, in debate (which is what is happening here), facts and logic can indeed be used to vanquish one's counterpart. When the facts are in favour of one side of the debate, it is fairly typical that they will leverage them in the debate. If you observe a debate where one side doe…

Nah. You were referring to the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and the ease with which they could be dispelled by logic, were they of such little grounding as we say Qanon is. You weren't referring to HN, or any debate in particular; that's a rhetorical sleight of hand. Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this…

> You weren't referring to HN, or any debate in particular; that's a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Reading someone's mind and then asserting it as what they are doing and knocking that down (a classic strawman argument) is the rhetorical sleight of hand (and also an innate capability that develops from a very young age, as far as I can tell).

In fact, what I was actually referring to was the particular angle I am arguing in this thread, here on HN, an argument that has been opposed by nothing other than rhetoric.

> Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this site.

Framing the argument via semantics (cherry picking one word, that was placed within quotation marks to explictly* indicate that it is being used in a figure-of-speech manner) to (again) turn it into a non-representative proxy of the actual argument and then sidetracking the discussion onto that, is another clever rhetorical slight of hand.

What remains, unaddressed, is the original argument.

The tactics are annoying, but I don't mind so much - seeing them on full, unapologetic display is actually kind of the point of the whole exercise from my perspective.

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Destroying people with facts and logic" isn't how human psychology works Completely agree that this isn't how human psychology works. However, in debate (which is what is happening here), facts and logic can indeed be used to vanquish one's counterpart. When the facts are in favour of one side of the debate, it is fairly typical that they will leverage them in the debate. If you observe a debate where one side doe…

Nah. You were referring to the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and the ease with which they could be dispelled by logic, were they of such little grounding as we say Qanon is. You weren't referring to HN, or any debate in particular; that's a rhetorical sleight of hand. Had you been referring to HN, you'd still have been wrong: "destroying" with anything, facts and logic included, is opposite to the spirit of this…

Disrupt everything? Software eats the world?

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to point out that conspiracies like this aren't purely fantasy You're doing it again! You can't justify belief in a baseless conspiracy theory by saying that some other vaguely related thing was true! You can't. The logic doesn't work. And it's expressly harmful, because now that "justified" belief can be weaponized to hurt your political enemies. Stop it.

I don't think it's appropriate to say things like "Stop it". Please do me the courtesy of not treating me like a child and acting like you are instructing me. The QAnon conspiracy is about pedophiles in government. The Rotterham scandal is about pedophiles enabled by government. The Epstein case is a mix of pedophiles and government. It's not crazy to suggest that pedophiles are mixed up with the government. We have…

Since you can't even spell Rotherham, I'll not give much weight to your analysis of the reasons behind the police failure there.

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

#227
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fair bit of back and forth on it, here's wiki to start it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sphere Most of the criticisms of the ideas of the public/private sphere root back to Aristotle, and unfortunately, Google has elevated more recent, post Marx criticisms of it (imo) since setting it up as an evil is the basis of popular current cultural theory, but it's a foundational concept that predates the vi…

I was responding to this: > The private sphere -- family, close friends, personal intimacy, etc -- is where people are at their best. We can be honest there. We can show weakness, we can apologize, we can compromise and we can forgive. It family where publicly charizmatic people stop trying to be charizmatic and start being abusive. Also, it is not rare, both private part and abuse part went up during lockdowns. Aris…

> Aristotle and Marx have zero to do with it and the way people on HN bring super old classics in completely unrelated context is getting obnoxious.

The Greeks are the source for a lot of our language and a lot of how we think about the world. Marx turned much of that upside down.

It's fine if you don't agree with the idea of "intellectual heritage" (or the influence of that heritage). But I (and others) do, so clearly we're going to talk about it.

It seems, uh, strange to fail to notice Marx's influence in particular given what happened in the 20th century and what continues to happen in China. Furthermore, the idea of the government as an instrument of violence used by the ruling class (which is so common these days, on HN too) is clearly straight out of Marx.

> The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

Certainly plenty of abuse happens in the private sphere. My original post was hasty.

My opinion is more complicated than "everyone is good in private". It's more like, at a certain point, "publicness" becomes a problem. And things that we can do in private (like goodness, love, and hatred) do not work in public. And yet we seem to be reaching for them anyway.

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

#228

Pay close attention to social media companies and privately run social networks and forums. I used to work for a major social media network that was growing and eventually stalled. If you run a social network and it gets popular you're going to run into major problems that no one talks about. 1.) Multiple governments, private organization and luddites send people to your company to compromise the source code. 2.) Peo…

Could you please give more details on how your company was stalled? Was it through the legal ways as in a government entity said that it must be shut-down or through some other methods from third parties?

This is how it works in reality. People take over parts of your company and do everything to make employees feel bad about the company. They then do everything to make your employees feel good about something/anything else to keep them distracted.

You start seeing really strange things like a severly overweight coworker suddenly having a trophy gf who starts talking poorly about everyone. People suddenly start becoming lazy out of nowhere because someone outside of the company has made them believe they are guaranteed millionaires when they haven't even IPO'd. People who used to be focused on their jobs suddenly start slending money wildly on ridiculous garbage.

While everyone is distracted in different ways people who had nothing to do with the success of the company silently takeover key parts of the company and start firing people that figure out what is happening.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to point out that conspiracies like this aren't purely fantasy You're doing it again! You can't justify belief in a baseless conspiracy theory by saying that some other vaguely related thing was true! You can't. The logic doesn't work. And it's expressly harmful, because now that "justified" belief can be weaponized to hurt your political enemies. Stop it.

I don't think it's appropriate to say things like "Stop it". Please do me the courtesy of not treating me like a child and acting like you are instructing me. The QAnon conspiracy is about pedophiles in government. The Rotterham scandal is about pedophiles enabled by government. The Epstein case is a mix of pedophiles and government. It's not crazy to suggest that pedophiles are mixed up with the government. We have…

> It's not crazy to suggest that pedophiles are mixed up with the government.

Yes. It. Is. Because that suggestion requires evidence, which Q Does. Not. Have. Rotherham is not evidence for Q. Epstein is not evidence for Q. Rotherham and Epstein existing in history are not a license to make shit up about democrats and pretend it's the truth.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anything that's a conspiracy theory though. Like, the fact that there's corruption in the high levels of government that willfully enable war... Sounds like something Britta said on Community. The fact that there may be specific groups of long tenured employees in the State Department doing it isn't that noteworthy either. They work there. The way you've written and described your views, experiences, and…

Conspiracy has a legal definition. People are prosecuted for it quite frequently. "An agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement's goal."[1] If the wars in the middle east, (I would say Iraq moreso than Afghanistan, as at least Afghanistan actually harbored Al Qaeda/Taliban), don't count as a textbook definition of conspiracy, I'm afraid nothing does.…

Conspiracy has a legal definition. "Conspiracy theory" has a different meaning. It is the sort of theory that resists evidence, since any evidence that opposes the theory is instead proof of the conspiracy. It is a form of magical thinking.
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