Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

'The challenges of studying 4chan & the Alt-Right: ‘Come on in the water’s fine’ (2020).

Unbeknown to the authors, a participant in a workshop at KCL examining how to study 4chan & assess their association with the Alt-Right was a 4chan user...

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

For several years now, there has been escalating concern, across national governments, inter-governmental organisations and think tanks, about the rise of far-right extremism & far-right terrorism globally.

press.un.org/en/2018/sgsm19…

Public authorities, commentators and civil society groups have reported that this rise is being cultivated in online spaces, such as 4chan, 8chan, Telegram and Gab. Despite growing concern, there is still limited academic research examining these spaces.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1659471910541963266?s=20

Even basic information remains estimated or unknown. Greater research of these spaces can assess the extent and nature of abusive, manipulative, and transgressive activities increasingly associated with them.
pewresearch.org/internet/2017/…

Research can: expose such behaviours & activities so their targets can be better protected from harm; help explain why these cultures develop in certain online spaces & not others, &; provide evidence regarding radicalisation processes that observers link to these communities.

Research can also illuminate the extent to which members of these communities represent a threat to outside groups, specific individuals, political events or society more widely.

The article is free to read (link below).

Readers should note that some of the content reproduced from 4chan is extremely offensive and can certainly be classified as hate speech.

I'll skip ahead to extracts from the conclusion.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

The article sought to demonstrate the value of discourse analysis in deepening understanding of free-extremist platforms, such as 4chan/pol/, by analysing a 4chan/pol/ thread created without the authors' knowledge during a workshop they ran on studying 4chan and the Alt-Right.

Different categories of user were identified, ranging from crude & offensive shitposters to those engaged in technical discussion, & revealed the sense of superiority that unites the community, & its belief in its power to ‘redpill’ or radicalise others.
slate.com/technology/202…

The authors examined for the first time the significance of influencers on the platform, demonstrating that extremist discourses on /pol/ may reflect individual efforts to shape conversation rather than emergent, collective behaviour.

The authors helped establish the possibilities & limitations of what can be learnt about individual users, & reflected on an under-researched ethical dilemma: how to research free-extremist platforms when participants may be responding to – & seeking to influence – that research.

Findings suggest several practical ways policymakers and researchers might proceed. Regarding radicalisation, analysis suggests limited potential in identifying behavioural radicalisation & offline trigger events using the site.

Any analysis is likely to be plagued by false positives and by the difficulty tracking individual users. The thread analysed contained eight threats or calls to action, none of which – to the authors' knowledge – was taken up at the time.

Analysing cognitive radicalisation on 4chan & similar sites shows promise, not least in identifying the contribution of ‘influencers’ to specific threads & their attempts to lead conversations towards extreme topics, or to promote extremist ideas, language or memes.

Future research would benefit significantly from investment in online storage of platform content. This would help address the problem of ephemerality and could enable consistent classification and categorisation.

Researchers still use manual screenshots to archive 4chan content and store datasets locally. Practical methods for capturing, grouping and analysing threads – and conversations within them – would make research faster and more accessible.

Ideally, future research into free-extremist platforms would combine quantitative and qualitative approaches, encompassing ethnographic, informatic and discourse analytic methods.

The authors' research reinforced existing research that 4chan/pol/ is a community in which expressions of racism and white supremacy appear normalised, whether used seriously or ironically.

But the authors also show that to understand how users seek to achieve this discursively requires going beyond quantifying patterns of hate speech, either because they are too easy to manipulate, or that users employ other language to avoid detection.

Multi-disciplinary approaches could better assess the relationship between 4chan users & users of other sites/services eg Gab, Discord, Telegram, Reddit & 8chan. Quantitative research could benefit from the contextualisation of images & text that qualitative approaches provide.

This would help assess claims about such platforms’ societal influence, their ability to radicalise individuals, & make political discourse more extreme. Research is also needed into the appropriation into ‘mainstream politics’ of rhetorical methods associated with 4chan & /pol/.

Just as 4chan/pol/ evolved from association with Anonymous to a closer association with the Alt-Right, the methods used on /pol/ now appear to have been appropriated and re-interpreted by ‘mainstream’ political parties and governments.

ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c…

References to the QAnon conspiracy theory – which began on 4chan – are increasingly prominent in party politics.

The UK #GE2019 saw traditional parties reinterpreting ‘shitposting’ (posting low-quality content on social media to provoke attention).

inews.co.uk/news/technolog…

Pepe the Frog was found daubed on government buildings during Hong Kong protests as a symbol of non-conformity and dissent, though in a very different context from its previous appropriation by the Alt-Right.

The appropriation and re-interpretation of discursive tactics and symbols from such platforms by others seeking political change reinforces the importance of further study, mindful of the potential harms and amplification involved in doing so.

We have much to learn to understand what one user described as ‘le mystical 4chan’ and similar free-extremist communities.

Their communication dynamics may not represent ‘pure chaos in its natural form’ as they suggest, but it is highly complex.

They are right that we know too little about ‘the fundamental issues behind the phenomenon’.

This is the task for researchers as we seek to understand better a key source of political extremism in the digital age.