Shootings such as Christchurch draw attention to the sites and the message, and media coverage ends up amplifying it. One of the vectors pushing impressionable men and women to racist forums is mass media, said Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist and expert on online radicalization. How do people get drawn into racist forums? The dehumanization involved in racist jokes also hardens participants, wearing away any residual empathy for others. In part, throwing in random references to unconnected topics such as the video game Fortnite or online memes is a strategy to get the media to pick up and amplify the message through stories on unrelated topics. This gives cover for users to claim their posts are merely joking-and accounts for some of the deliberate trolling found inside the Christchurch manifesto. The culture of both 4chan and 8chan is deliberately ironic, over the top, and extreme. 8chan’s version of /pol/ has a single purpose, argues Robert Evans at the open-source investigative firm Bellingcat: “to radicalize their fellow anons to ‘real-life effortposting,’ i.e. Hosted in the Philippines, the site has become a cesspool of anti-Muslim conspiracies, neo-Nazism, and other far-right content. (It should be noted, however, that other parts of 4chan have expressed their dislike for /pol/.)Ĩchan, meanwhile, founded in 2013, is a more extremist version of /pol/. Perhaps unsurprisingly, /pol/ itself was rapidly overrun with racists the overarching culture of the board is far-right, violently racist, and enthusiastically supportive of Trump.
The most notorious part of 4chan is /pol/, short for “politically incorrect,” a politics discussion board founded in 2011 to replace the original /news/ board after it became overrun with racists. The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, which sees Donald Trump as fighting a vast, global pedophile conspiracy-began with 4chan posts, and white supremacists from sites like the neo-Nazi Stormfront have been actively recruiting on 4chan since at least 2012. Plenty of goofy fun has emerged from 4chan-it invented rickrolling and lolcats-but it also rapidly took on a misogynistic, bullying culture, producing infamous online harassment campaigns such as Gamergate, a targeted assault on women in the video game industry that engulfed the internet in 2014. But noticeably, the site is totally anonymous, with no logins required, usernames optional, and threads set to expire after a certain time users are often known as “anons.”
Today, roughly 22 million users, the majority of them young men, post on the site every month to a variety of themed imageboards such as /v/ (video games), /lgbt/, and /x/ (paranormal).
4chan is a long-running forum, set up in 2003 chiefly for the discussion of Japanese anime and manga. Two of the chief sites for online white nationalist radicalization are 4chan and 8chan. Other mass shootings-such as the recent Gilroy Garlic Festival attack, the Pittsburgh synagogue murders in 2018, and the church killings in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015-have also been inspired by white nationalist ideas.Įxperts, joined by some politicians, are increasingly classifying these acts as terrorism, part of a global white nationalist movement that recruits or inspires potential shooters.
Both killers were young white men, and while the ideology behind the Dayton attack is not yet known, the El Paso shooter posted an online manifesto espousing his racist ideology on the far-right website 8chan-as did the attackers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March and at the Poway synagogue, north of San Diego, in April. Two mass shootings rocked the United States again this weekend, the first in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, the second on Sunday in Dayton, Ohio.