The chans “normalize the kinds of narratives and grievances that are dangerous”, Segal said. While the far-right online ecosystem has grown significantly since then, the edgy humor and racist politics of ‘chan’ culture continue to prove influential, especially among younger users. It was tied for the single most-reported pathway to radicalization. She found nearly 25% reported that they considered themselves radicalized – or, in their terms, “redpilled” – by the culture of 4chan and 8chan. Cassie Miller, a researcher at the center, analyzed a self-selected survey of users to a white supremacist webforum. 4chan co-opted the concept more recently, caricaturing it along the way, to justify its own white supremacist philosophy.Īnti-extremist groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center have warned for years that 4chan and 8chan would continue inspiring domestic terror attacks. It’s a deeply ironic reference to Nation of Islam theology – which holds that a Black scientist named Yakub created the white race more than 6,000 years ago. On a poster hanging in the apartment where Spencer died was a cartoon of a Black man with an enlarged head. Like those who have carried out other domestic terror attacks that rocked the US, Canada and New Zealand in recent years, Spencer situated his mass shooting in a tangle of ironic memes and 4chan in-jokes. Police believe Spencer shot himself to death as officers breached his apartment.
“A basedman shot at the school on April 22, 2022,” the edit read, using a message board term derived from the word “based,” which is 4chan slang for somebody who agrees to the board’s warped worldview. A few minutes later: “Waiting for police to catch up with me.”Īs he waited, Spencer logged on to Wikipedia to edit the entry for Edmund Burke School, which he had just opened fire on. “They’re in the wrong part of the building right now searching,” he posted at one point. Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesĮven as police stormed the apartment building where Spencer hid, with officers maneuvering past a surveillance camera that he had set up in the hallway and was monitoring, Spencer continued to post to the message board. Someone under the username ‘Raymond Spencer’ began posting to 4chan just two minutes after shooting began in Washington DC.
4chan archive windows#
The clip streamed images and sounds of the barrage of bullets which slammed into cars and shattered windows at an adjacent school while also maiming four strangers. The newly published message contained a link – to a 30-second video of images captured from the digital scope of Spencer’s rifle. Just two minutes after the shooting began, someone under the username “Raymond Spencer” logged onto the normally-anonymous 4chan and started a new thread titled “shool shooting”. He fired 200 rounds from a makeshift sniper’s nest, injuring a man, two women, and a 12-year-old girl. The trolling, humor, appeals to violence: it “seeps outside the confines of the message boards,” he added.
“The chans – 4chan, 8chan, etc – are some of the most vile places on the internet,” Segal told the Guardian. But it was still a stark reminder of how many online extremists and the movements with which they sympathize can trace their origins to either 4chan or 8chan, said Oren Segal, vice-president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Seemingly by sheer luck, Spencer’s recent attack in Washington was less costly in terms of lives. And after New Zealand police arrested Brenton Tarrant, who shot and killed 51 worshippers in mosques in Christchurch, he cited 4chan and 8chan as direct influences.
4chan archive update#
Alek Minassian, 25, posted an update on Facebook with a direct reference to 4chan and its extreme misogynistic community of so-called incels, short for involuntary celibates, before launching a deadly vehicle ramming rampage in Toronto in 2018.
0 kommentar(er)
