Before walking into a Norwegian mosque with a pair of shotguns earlier this month, Philip Manshaus called for a race war in a statement he posted on the dark reaches of social media. He couldn’t go to 8chan, the renegade message board where suspects in three recent mass shootings had uploaded white nationalist screeds. That board had been booted days earlier by its internet provider, after the man suspected of killing 22 people in an El Paso Walmart posted his own hate-filled manifesto. It wasn’t hard for Manshaus to find a megaphone, though. The 21-year-old – whose Aug. 10 attack was foiled when a worshiper tackled him – posted on a little-known board called endchan. Much attention since the El Paso shooting on Aug. 3 has focused on 8chan. But white supremacists remain active all across the web – including on the biggest social media sites, where they proselytize in plain sight. Attempts to curb racist and violent views on the internet have become serious only recently, with limited success. In April, a white nationalist charged with killing 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his gruesome shooting spree on Facebook. David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, still maintains his own YouTube channel, as do other prominent white nationalist groups. Although 8chan took down the El Paso shooter’s manifesto, it turned up soon afterward on many other sites, including mainstream Reddit and Facebook. One person who posted the manifesto on the popular message board 4chan before the news media had even disclosed its existence said gleefully, “whoooooo WE ARE DOING THIS!!!!!” The post drew a quick response: “Race war, baby!” Moderators at 4chan never removed that post. The presence of racist ideology on popular social media sites has helped fuel the rise of white nationalism, experts say – far more so than on the niche sites, which tend to cater to those already deep in the movement. “You had a decade-long period in which social media, meaning virtually all of it, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., was unregulated when it came to speech,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on extremism at the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center. “Hate groups were completely active there. They were spreading propaganda like wildfire.” (…) Even though 4chan and 8chan are unrelated, their histories are closely intertwined, offering insights into where some internet hatred festers. Users of both sites often have seemed indistinguishable. Both sites are full of vile language, with frequent use of the N-word and slurs against Jews. Both are “imageboards,” where users embed images in their posts. On 4chan, posters often talk nonchalantly about violence. Last week one asked, “Why won’t Generation X and Millennial’s rise up together and kill all the baby boomers? It’s the one real way to fix all our problems.” Another replied, “the enemy is the Jews, not boomers.” Christopher Poole started 4chan in 2003, when he was a high school student, for fans obsessed with anime. But 4chan was purist in its approach to free speech and over time attracted a lot of young white males with extremist right-wing political views. By contrast, 8chan was founded as an obscure copycat board in 2013 by Fredrick Brennan, a 4chan fan. Users on 4chan don’t have to register and almost never reveal their true names. The same was true on 8chan. Unlike most social media sites, there’s no way to track a user’s history. Posters’ identities are unknown even to the message board. Volunteers manage 4chan, as they did 8chan. The only sitewide rule on 8chan was to not break U.S. laws; 4chan’s politics board bans racist posts, a rule routinely ignored. While 8chan is now gone, 4chan is ubiquitous on social media. It has Twitter account, a Facebook page and a Reddit group with more than 1 million members. Poole, who now works for Google, stepped down as administrator in 2015. He did not respond to an email requesting an interview. His departure came shortly after two scandals. Someone posted stolen nude photographs of Hollywood actresses on 4chan, which Poole said cost him tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Around the same time, he booted posters who were harassing female critics of sexism in video games, a scandal known as GamerGate. Many of those exiled were welcomed by 8chan, turning an obscure message board into a much bigger player.
via usatoday: Sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter allowed white supremacists to flourish. Now what?
