Thread by @spacetwinks

right, maybe i'll do a Medium of this, but i'll do a quick tweet thread talking about /pol/ and how it operated on 4chan, and how it affects shit you're seeing beyond the internet right now

what we know now as /pol/ actually used to be /new/. /new/ came around in 2010 and was supposed to be for news discussion. it eventually got deleted and relaunched as /pol/.

why did it get deleted? funny you should ask:

4chan - which had been around since 2003 - had been developing this problem for quite awhile, because one of the core thing of 4chan is the lack of moderation and rules. there *are* rules, but which rules there aren't, and which ones don't get enforced, makes a culture.

you can see this in things like what one would've assumed would be the lawless playground of /b/ - random. the idea was that "anything goes" on /b/, but that's *not* actually true. one particular example we can point to is one of the most meaningless rules: no furry shit.

this was a pointless damn rule, but it was an enforced one - you posted furry content, wherever, that shit got deleted and often you got banned too, and yes, that happened on /b/ too.

what *wasn't* banned? well, all the racism and misogyny and homophobia, "ironic" or otherwise.

so seven years of this, of more and more 'joking' bigotry, which gives room to the real hardcore believers, and also gives them cover. even if some dipshit doesn't "actually mean it" for their own bigoted jokes, it helps make space and cover for those who do.

so in this space where there's been so much casual racism going around for years and years to begin with, unmoderated and unpunished, of *course* there's going to be plenty of racism on 4chan, and *especially* on a board dedicated to world news.

so /new/ gets deleted for being too racist, /pol/ gets launched, and eventually gets viewed as a 'containment board' for all the racism and other flavors of bigotry that have become more and more a central part of the entirety of 4chan.

as a 'containment board', it simultaneously succeeded and failed at its goals.

sure, initially, it becomes a place that's where the majority of the super racist types end up hanging out on, instead of on /co/ or /a/ or what have you...

but it can't stay that way.

for one: 4chan's always been racist. al-ways. like i said earlier, the ground's always been there, particularly in /b/. and, like i said, even the ones who are "just joking" are 1. still racist anyway and 2. make room for the people who definitely are not joking.

for further elaboration: i do not think the majority of the shitheads making racist jokes on /b/ in the early 00s actually wanted to hang out with real deal nazis. they were still racist, but the function of their racism was different: they were idiots looking for a reaction.

again: still fucking racist, but these aren't the people who *wanted* to hang out with the nazis.

but they still made room for them by making all that shit so acceptable in their online community.

so, back to /pol/ and its failure as a containment board: two things going on here you can notice immediately, the poor moderation on other boards, and how there's something of a sort of 'rolling of the tides' effect from /pol/ itself.

people from /pol/ go to other boards for their other interests - anime, comics, a lot of nerd interests, and of course /r9k/ to complain about women - and bring their beliefs with them, shifting the culture of those boards to match /pol/'s bit by bit.

and it's not hard, either! because for the majority of these boards, that ground was fertile for this stuff to begin with! casual misogyny and racism and homophobia already flowed free on most of them. they had an easy foothold.

and of course, people on these boards would also go to /pol/ from the first time and come back with much more of those beliefs themselves, particularly people who might already feel isolated and/or resentful.

/pol/'s effectiveness as a containment board is maybe a couple months.

good example would be /co/: if you know the comics board from the old days, you know it used to have a reputation for being one of the 'chiller' boards, especially compared to /a/ and /v/. less bigotry, less anger.

this could not hold, though - part of the reason /co/ was chiller was because it had a relatively much smaller userbase, making it easier to moderate, among other niceties. /co/ exploded in interest over time, and bigoted power users take hold.

anyone in those spaces who was disgusted with what was happening or truly realized how bad it had always been ended up leaving, which, of course, just gives more ground to the organizing bigots. you talk to former /x/'ers, they can confirm too, among others.

and since 4chan has never really had any rules about bigotry on its boards, nor any really moderation about it aside from when /new/ was deleted, the ground remains extremely fertile for these groups to *keep* growing, keep going further right, and take more space.

and this of course cannot stay to just 4chan, which had long since stopped being some kind of internet secret - all these ideologies get more and more space on places like twitter, facebook, tumblr, etc, many of them coming straight from /pol/ itself.

there's something of a really strong group of boards here where you can see that tide rolling effect i talked about, going in and coming back harder than before each time - /a/, /v/, /r9k/, and /pol/. *huge* overlap between all 4 of these boards.

/v/ was already *always* angry, *always* resentful. prime ground to make even angrier and more resentful. also huge, too big to moderate. a lot of the same in /a/, which also had none too restrained resentment from women, which rolled back and forth from /r9k/.

and of course all of thse roll back into /pol/ and then back out. it's foolish to look at these dynamics and focus on just a single board - hardly anybody using 4chan read and posted just *one* board. there's a group effect here.

a wildly unmoderated space that had already given plenty of room to bigotry, a board that centralized all the loudest bigots, several boards that were already resentful and bigoted themselves...

you have a perfect pressure cooker.

cross that over with parallel internet groups happening at the same time, doing similar things - MRA/PUAs, FYAD on Something Awful, and so on - and there's a ton of cross pollination going on, making these groups larger, louder, more and more radical.

twitter is likely the perfect endpoint of all this - wildly unmoderated, buying deeply into "anyone can say anything" which, as we saw on any other space, just makes rooms for the bigots to take over.

incels didn't come from fucking nowhere, and they don't organize and get away with what they do for no reason either - there's very real history going on here, with very obvious examples about how loose moderation makes them possible, almost inevitable.

and god i did not even bring up the nazis who have specifically targeted these places as recruiting grounds. this really has happened, and it's not hard to see why!

bt they weren't even necessary. 4chan's culture and lack of moderation could essentially force itself right.

add-on: the SPLC had an article recently talking about a white nationalist website where they asked users what brought them there.

look at what's tying for first place. splcenter.org/20180419/mcinn…