That’s the finding of a study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Cyprus University of Technology, University College London and Telefonica Research. In fact, alt-right communities within 4chan and Reddit are veritable hatcheries from which crawl a surprisingly large number of the headlines that eventually infest Twitter. Reading the output of what the Guardian once dubbed the “ lunatic, juvenile, brilliant, ridiculous and alarming” 4chan community can melt your brain.īut you’ve got to hand it to them: the site that persuaded web users to microwave their iPhones has always been good at clogging up the internet with its memetic fatbergs. PizzaGate is only one of a long lineage of fake news spawned on 4chan’s message boards. Trump and 4chan’s far-right fringe message board… and which wound up confabulated into PizzaGate by somebody on 4chan who connected the phrase “cheese pizza” to pedophiles, who use the initials “c.p.” to denote child pornography on chat boards. It started with hacked emails on WikiLeaks… which got scoured for political wrongdoing in the Clinton campaign staff by a popular Reddit forum dedicated to Donald J. But it wasn’t luck that planted the so-called “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory in his head: we can credit a particularly dark corner of 4chan for that. The judge said at the time that it was “sheer luck” that Edgar Maddison Welch didn’t kill anybody. Ebola-chan: a jokey cartoon “mascot” for Ebola that, in the hands of some particularly unprincipled 4chan users, became a hoax directed at vulnerable West Africans.In June, a 29-year-old man who fired a military-style assault rifle inside a popular Washington pizzeria, wrongly believing he was saving children trapped in a sex-slave ring, was sentenced to four years in prison.Needless to say, that’s one of many 4chan news hoaxes. Apple Wave: an alleged “feature” of the iPhone 6, hyped by 4chan users on Twitter, wherein people can charge their phones by microwaving them.Bikini bridge: an invented beauty/fitness trend that encouraged women to lose enough weight to create a gap between the bones of their hip and pelvis the trend, though fake, eventually caught on in online eating-disorder communities.#Leakforjlaw: a similar social media prank that encouraged women to post their nude photos in support of Jennifer Lawrence.#Cutforbieber: a Twitter hashtag that encouraged young Beliebers to cut themselves to demonstrate their love for the performer.Fake bomb threats: a vast number of hoaxers have posted mass bomb and shooting threats to 4chan, prompting several arrests and evacuations.4chan has successfully gotten a swastika to trend on Google. Google- and poll-bombing: voting or searching for the same terms en masse, to either sabotage an online vote or make a topic trend artificially.The cyberbullying of Jessi Slaughter: one of the earliest high-profile incidents of cyberbullying, in which 4chan members sent death threats and calls to an 11-year-old girl who would later make multiple suicide attempts.Gamergate has since wrecked the lives of several female gamers and commentators and spawned a larger discussion about the way that industry treats women. Gamergate: an ongoing movement to expose “corruption” in video game journalism, which was (purportedly!) drummed up by 4chan users.Celebgate: the leak of dozens of stolen celebrity nude photos, which - while no longer available on 4chan - still exist as downloadable torrents across the Web.
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