4chan has a lot less extremism than people imagine, rspecially compared to platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on certain boards. The reputation of being extremist did more 'in favour' of its extremism than the original userbase and design ever did.
4chan is only outdone by 8chan. “It’s only concentrated on certain boards” is the same lame excuse Reddit used to ignore /r/thedonald and now /r/conservative.
4chan doesn't use algorithms to push users to certain boards afaik, makes it better than the others in its design. I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.
Facebook and Twitter are far worse sources of extremism. There are entire groups dedicated to genetic comparisons between races, 'who would you do' groups that do nothing but photos of young women in bikinis farmed FROM facebook/ig.
4chan is where you go too far. 4chan users typically don't foster extremism, they are the extreme. They don't post pictures of young women, they post addresses and walkthroughs of their apartments.
Yes, I feel like it's far less harmful than the other sites for this reason. These bad parts of 4chan aren't the majority of the site either, a large minority maybe, but the site in general is much smaller. Users are also attracted to the image of 'extremism', 4chan in the far past didn't have this as its main audience of newcomers in its early stages.
It's easy to control for governments compared to facebook/reddit/... because it's just some boards, way better than massive amounts of posts creating a personal zone for everyone.
>I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.
4chan has /pol/. 4chan inspired Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon and numerous incidents of extremist violence. Those other platforms mostly just spread and accelerate the toxic culture that originated on 4chan.
I'm not sure if most of 4chan was actually so on board with the whole gamergate thing and all the things which followed. pre-/pol/ 4chan was a whole different thing. It was outsiders joining 4chan which did most of the posting, twitter and facebook were the ones which allowed this to happen.
Internet starting with a 1000 4chans wouldn't create what we have today (you'll just get lots of small fringe groups), internet starting with a 1000 facebooks/twitters/... will always end in extremism of a big portion of the population.
And — this is really shocking — Jeffrey Epstein caused /pol/ to exist, which makes him indirectly responsible for almost all stupid internet politics of the last decade.
