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The Internet

The Washington Post Asks: Should 8chan Be Considered a Terrorist Recuiting Site? (washingtonpost.com) 322

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: As most of the world condemned last week's mass shooting in New Zealand, a contrary story line emerged on 8chan, the online message board where the alleged shooter had announced the attack and urged others to continue the slaughter. "Who should i kill?" one anonymous poster wrote. "I have never been this happy," wrote another. "I am ready. I want to fight...." The persistence of the talk of violence on 8chan has led some experts to call for tougher actions by the world's governments, with some saying the site increasingly looks like the jihadi forums organized by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda...

8chan's founder, Fredrick Brennan, said Jim Watkins [8chan's sole administrator] owns other Internet businesses and has built a technical fortress to guard 8chan from potential takedowns: He owns nearly every component securing the site to the backbone of the Web, including its servers, which are scattered around the world. "You can send a complaint, but no one's going to do anything. He owns the whole operation," Brennan said. "It's how he keeps people confused and guessing...." Watkins is content to lose money, Brennan said, because he sees it as a pet project: "8chan is like a boat to Jim. It doesn't matter if it makes money. He just enjoys using it...."

8chan, however, is shielded in another way: the U.S. web-services giant Cloudflare, which helps websites guard against "distributed denial of service," or DDoS, attacks that online vigilante groups have used to target 8chan in the past.

The Post reports that Brennan "worries there are no true technical solutions beyond a total redesign of the Web, focused around identification and moderation, that could undermine it as a venue for free expression." Brennan tells the Post that "The Internet as a whole is not made to be censored. It was made to be resilient. And as long as there's a contingent of people who like this content, it will never go away."

On Tuesday, 8chan posted tips on Twitter for what to do "If your ISP is blocking a website you'd like to browse" -- a tweet which is now pinned to the top of its feed.
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The Washington Post Asks: Should 8chan Be Considered a Terrorist Recuiting Site?

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Because that's where we're headed. No one will be anonymous anymore. We must all think and act the same.

    • Because that's where we're headed. No one will be anonymous anymore. We must all think and act the same.

      Right, it's all about enforcing groupthink. It couldn't *possibly* be people getting frustrated by anonymous people popping up out of the dirt, intentionally conflating different issues to generate outrage and anger, while they walk away singing Dennis Leary's "I'm an asshole" to themselves.

  • Should it be? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fenrif ( 991024 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @01:40PM (#58325470)
    Sure, but only if Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Whatsapp, Hotmail, Gmail, and all radio and TV broadcasts are also considered terrorit rectruitment sites. Otherwise it just seems like scapegoating and hypocrisy. Though that's pretty par for the course I guess.
    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @02:40PM (#58325744)
      to reign in the worst elements of their community. By all accounts 8Chan bills itself as a haven for those sorts.

      There are arguments to be made that 8chan shouldn't be considered a terrorist recruitment site. For example, that it's not their intended purpose and that any recruitment taking place is a side effect of their laissez faire approach to moderation. But it's not a fair argument to make that because a terrorist recruiter can post to Facebook that means 8chan's automatically off the hook. Facebook would very quickly ban the individual if there was even a whiff of potential violence. 8chan wouldn't take down a post unless there was a very, very clear violation of law (and there's accusations that even then they'll turn a blind eye).

      Also, I think we're conflating up "Should be considered a recruitment tool" vs "is actively recruiting terrorists". There's a big difference. For the former it means the FBI keeps a closer eye on what goes on. For the latter it means the FBI/CIA/Military/local police (depending on the country) raids the place.
      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @04:31PM (#58326284)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • because the bastards want cheap programmers, and they don't want it getting around that learning to code isn't a valid career path.

          Twitter pushes the same right wing corporate narrative as all media outlets. I'm a lefty. They're not on my side. They're on Mark Zuckerberg's side, and the other billionaires. Anything that gets in the way of pushing money and power gets banned. The alt-right aren't really getting banned. A few of your guys took the violence thing a bit too far and scared them, but twitter'
          • Absolutely, my brother.

            This is why I wish people would stop getting hung up on the obsolete, stultifying left/right binary model of politics. Perhaps it was always a false dichotomy, I'm not sure. But it definitely does not describe the reality of today's political alignments.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Textbook example of a shitty conspiracy theory.

          Twitter is less than perfect. You use that as evidence that Twitter is involved in some kind of conspiracy to silence "the right", despite all the far right accounts they have thus far failed to ban.

          In support of this you cite Joe Rogan, friend of Alex Jones and occasional guest on Infowars, known for his promotion of conspiracy theories and beliefs based on psychedelic drug use.

      • to reign in

        to REIN in. It's about controlling horses, not which country someone is king of...

        That aside, we have the First Amendment for a reason. And the reason is not "to rein in the worst elements of their community".

        Trust me, you'll only make some really bad ideas more popular by forbidding people to talk about them in public....

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Facebook actively fights attempts to radicalize its users. 8chan actively promotes it, opening new boards and creating FAQs/sticky posts to assist.

      You can argue that Facebook is really bad at what it attempts to do and I wouldn't argue, but never the less there is a reason why the Christchurch terrorist favoured 8chan.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Better to know and react to what is known, than to not know and only find out when they react. So silence 8chan or simply pay more attention to it. Stick to the law, someone says something illegal on 8chan, carry out an investigation and try to find them and prosecute them.

        Can 8chan incite violence, not really, no real names hence mostly ignored, just trolls trolling trolls, as a social media game. Will it attract those with more intent, obviously because they see it as real, rather than as a social game bu

    • Sure, but only if Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Whatsapp, Hotmail, Gmail, and all radio and TV broadcasts are also considered terrorit rectruitment sites.

      No, No, No, Yes by some, No that's silly, No that's silly, No and No. Now if you care to figure out what the nos and yeses have in common you'll find that the Nos actively engage in censoring and removing content from their sites. The yeses do not. The "that's silly" is just that, silly since 1-to-1 communication is not recruitment.

      Otherwise it just seems like scapegoating and hypocrisy. Though that's pretty par for the course I guess.

      Actually it seems more like ignorance.

  • Wrong question! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @01:48PM (#58325506) Journal

    The real question is: Should the Washington Post be considered Jeff Bezos Blog?

    • Re:Wrong question! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @02:47PM (#58325784)

      The real question is: Should the Washington Post be considered Jeff Bezos Blog?

      Should Fox "News" be considered Rupert Murdoch's, Donald Trump's or the Republican Party's Vlog?

      [ It's pretty clear that my rhetorical question is more likely than yours. ]

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      No. Bezos has no editorial control over the Wash Post, no matter how badly you want to believe it because that's what you and your ilk would do in his position.

    • That's actually not too difficult to answer.

      Come up with some objective criteria. For example:

      1. How factual do the articles tend to be?
      2. How inflammatory does the language of the articles tend to be (ie: How much do they inform vs manipulate readers) ?

      There is at least one site that I know of that is attempting to do exactly this. http://www.adfontesmedia.com/ [adfontesmedia.com]

      According to that, Washington Post is doing pretty good. A hell of a lot better than Fox is, at any rate.

      Of course, this means nothing if you ca

  • Nope (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The people who ask that question are the same people who called Jordan Peterson's book a recruitment book even though its content serves to deradicalize people and give them a purpose and responsibilities to eradicate hate and suppress it rather than feed it, a book which is also a good rehab program for criminals and not only those with depression and confusion.

    If i had to define a site great for terrorist recruitment, it's the mass media leftists who don't pass a day insulting someone, throwing labels of

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24, 2019 @01:58PM (#58325556)

    Surely driving them even further underground will only make things better!

    • Driving them underground does work well, it reduces their intake of new recruits and propaganda reach without making them meaningfully more difficult to surveil.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Speaking of recruiting. What I am getting from the incident with only some of the information. The individual made a rather foolish trip to Pakistan, advertised himself on social media to attract direct social contact and attracted the worst sort who then sexually abused them. The Mossad picked up on it, a pulled the target into a distorted social circle to further prime the individual up for violence and provided training and support to carry the attack, acting as the poor fellows social support group and

        • What evidence is there that the shooter was sexually abused in Pakistan or groomed by the Mossad? And you think the Mossad wants to sponsor a terrorist to carry out an attack in Australia for some reason? Seems like a lot of unsupported nonsense to me.

  • Lenin didn't have Internet access.
    Neither did 5th of November terrorists (back in 1605), nor did Bakunin, John Brown, the KKK, the IMRO, the IRA (up until very recently), and so on.
    So no, the mere existence of Internet access isn't a terrorist recruitment tool, albeit it makes it easier for terrorists to communicate over large distances.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24, 2019 @02:03PM (#58325586)

    Woke: The Internet is a terrorist recruiting site.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Yep, all them Daesh wannabes just showed up in Syria and Iraq because they loved Islam and their friends were going too. The internet had nothing to do with it. In other news, Trump doesn't use Twittler for sheep calls to his faithful. The last tax giveaway is paying for itself. And the Earth goes around the Moon.

  • I don't think sites like 8chan and zerohedge, etc should be considered terrorist recruiting sites. It's basically just a bunch of edgelord shitposters who think it's clever to post racism, hatred, death threats, child porn and calls for violence. How are they supposed to know that actual terrorists and crazies would take them seriously and join their community?

    On the other had, they should be considered a gateway drug to terrorism. ISPs and hosting services should consider carefully whether to do busines

    • by Anonymous Coward

      you do realize zerohedge is a financial news site. and it's much like seekingalpha. short sellers skirting the edge of legality by looking to make money off of gullible fools.

  • Yes. No. Sorta. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
    See here [youtube.com].

    For those that don't wanna bother with a long video, the article is about what the author calls "stochastic terrorism". Bruce Sterling touched on it in his novel "Distraction".

    It works like a sales pipeline. You start out with PewDiePie spouting white supremacy "full the lulz" and for cheap publicity. A subset of his viewers "graduate" to harder stuff like Ben Shapiro and Sargon of Arkad, then on to Laura Southern and finally to stuff like the Unite the Right rally.

    The New Zealand shoot
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I hope you're joking. In that same vein your racist uncle or a history book put you in the "pipeline". The terrorist also said Candace owens radicalized him and spouted a bunch of memes, must be true too. Following your? line of though we would have to ban any and all references to white supremacy lest some poor souls actually start believing in it.

      And if it applies to that, did a few million listeners put on Biggie Smalls and get into the drug dealer sales pipeline, eventually coming out criminals? Just s

    • Re:Yes. No. Sorta. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 24, 2019 @04:09PM (#58326152)

      Do you honestly believe this? That random kids are going to be watching his massacre video, listen his "subscribe to pewdiepie" comment, and that's how they're going to be introduced to a network of alt-lite individuals?
      No, it was bait. Pewdiepie is big, the #1 youtuber, has famously had major efforts put towards deplatforming him, and most importantly, people can't seem to shut up about any little thing he does. The shooter said it because he knew people wouldn't be able to resist talking about it, which draws attention towards the actual video, his actions, his purpose, and his ideas, which is the whole point of terrorism.

      • Yeah, I believe it. It's a fairly solid strategy for radicalizing people. It works because several of the people in the pipeline either don't know or don't care that they're part of it.

        Yes, some punk kids will watch PDP and pick up on his mild racism. It'll resonate with them and they'll go looking for more. Like I said, they'll find Shapiro and Sargon, who will lead them to Southern and down the chain to rallies where thinly disguised Nazi flags are flow and finally to open white supremacy and Nazism.
      • PewDiePie is an internet celebrity. He has money, and influence - when he says something, millions hear it. Tens of millions. When he decides it's funny to say 'Kill all the jews! Only jokeing.' then a lot of people get to see that joke. So yes, he does get a lot of criticism.

        I just think he is un-funny. Most of his 'comedy' consists of screaming like a chipmunk on helium.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        PewDiePie is a well established alt-lite gateway. He was following a large number of alt-right people on YouTube until the terror attack, at which point he deleted them all. If it was nothing then why delete them?

        Come on, you can't be that naive. He subscribes to all those alt-right channels, has some of them on as guests, uses their rhetoric and language in his own videos (claiming it's a joke) and then follows them into the same history-scrubbing panic once the terror attack hits.

  • Covington (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'll agree proclaiming 8chan a terrorist recruitment organization if you agree to do the same for every activis publication (aka "journalists" aka "Washington Post") which had its "journalists" calling for an organization of terrorist group to see the parents of the Covington kids sacked and bullied, the school dismantled and even torched in some checkmark tweets, the kids killed and terrorized for the rest of their lives, over fake news they themselves created.
    Oh, is that inconvenient? SJWs are pretty much

  • by 0xdeadbeef ( 28836 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @02:45PM (#58325764) Homepage Journal

    I went looking for the video to satisfy my morbid curiosity, but it was being aggressively removed from my usual haunts, so I went to voat knowing that would be one of the few places not censoring links to it.

    I discovered that most of their links were already dead, and that the comments were almost unanimously celebrating the murders. I lost my interest in seeing the video, having even that little in common with those cretins was too much.

    And I thought, these are the people who traffic in the conspiracy theory that thousands of American Muslims were celebrating 9/11. But here they are, literally cheering a terrorist, doing the thing that they imagine others doing to rationalize their racism. Not only are they no different than an Islamic terrorist sympathizer, they're no different than the Islamic terrorist sympathizer that their imaginations have constructed. It's like they want to be recruited into terrorism. They don't necessarily hate radical Islam, they envy it.

    The alt-right isn't a political movement, it is a sickness that needs to be eradicated. We should treat them the same way we treat members of Al Qaeda and ISIS. When they whine about free speech, we remind them that enemy combatants don't have rights. This will infuriate them, and every time they lash out with more terrorism, the government has another excuse to hit them even harder. Eventually there won't be any fight left in them, or there won't be any left.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @03:00PM (#58325862)
      it's job. There's too kinds of Alt-righter. First, there's the leadership, who's just taking advantage of the rank and file to make money.

      Then there's the rank and file. They're almost entirely made up of young dudes (usually white) who lost factory and blue collar jobs to outsourcing and don't really have a place in society anymore.

      It's why the left is pushing the "Green New Deal". It's a jobs program to neuter the right wing's main source of power (disaffected working age men). The "Green" part is mostly incidental. It's there to steal votes from the Green Party so they can't be used by the right wing to spoil elections.

      With very few exceptions give a man a job and a woman and he'll settle the fuck down. Mix in an education and he won't fall for demagogues. There will be exceptions (Osama Bin Laden comes to mind) but they won't have enough followers to get anything done before they get caught.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Is the green aspect not simply because it's a massive economic opportunity to build new infrastructure not only in America but around the world with American tech? And an opportunity that so far Europe and China are leading on?

    • When they whine about free speech, we remind them that enemy combatants don't have rights.

      Interesting. So saying despicable things makes them enemy combatants? I despise the alt-right as much as you do, as the sniveling little shitheads they are. But careful, cowboy.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by russotto ( 537200 )

      The alt-right isn't a political movement, it is a sickness that needs to be eradicated.

      Whoa, calm down there Hitler [phdn.org].

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      The alt-right isn't a political movement

      Correct. It's a label used to demonise vast swathes of people most of whom have committed the cardinal sin of daring to disagree with others.

      Disparage the idiots cheering on an act of murder. Just don't lazily use stupid labels that are applied to many innocent people too.

  • I never heard of it before and because of that irrelevancy to my existence, I can live without it.

    Thanks for asking.

    • It's one of those total-free-speech places. They detest the idea of moderation. The problem with such a place is that you end up with all the people who have no-where else to go, because the rest of the internet keeps banning them.

  • by xenobyte ( 446878 ) on Monday March 25, 2019 @04:07AM (#58329268)

    People are looking for places where they can say what they feel like (that's real freedom of expression) and 8chan has become such a place, like 4chan used to be.

    When we live in a world where a comment to a news story about yet another hostage/terrorist drama with Islamist bad guys can cause 30 days in Facebook jail. Here's the details and the 'horrible hate speech' it contains: "No, a story like that simply reflects real life where Muslims do most of the terrorist killing in the world today, vastly outnumbering all other kinds of terrorists when it comes to both number of dead and number of incidents."

    It's not made up or exaggerated in any way. It's simply uncomfortable facts. Just in the week around the Christchurch attack where 50 Muslim people got killed, about 120 people got killed in a number of Islamist attacks on christian and catholic churches in both Africa, The Middle East and the predominantly Muslim areas of East Asia - and it was a relatively quiet week...

  • Since the attackers are allegedly Australian this presents a rather convenient opportunity for NZ to request Australia exercise its newly acquired intelligence laws under the guise of the 2018 Assistance Access bill.

    Anywhere 8chan flows, they will be there to collect the information.

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