The board specifically set aside for politics on 4chan is probably the most popular neo-Nazi discussion forum on the internet. "Far-right" is a completely fair description of the political leanings of that site.
/pol/ most certainly is that way. I've been on 4chan for more than 15 years and I research far right extremism professionally. /pol/ isn't the most right wing or extreme place on the internet, but claiming it's not like 'traditional racial supremacy [..] neo-nazis' is nonsense, that's 20-25% of /pol/ threads.
Please elaborate. This is a common claim among "disinformation experts," when what they really mean is they occasionally browse /pol/ while telling themselves it's an academic exercise and they're obviously better than everyone posting on that "cesspool."
If reading /pol/ for hours a day is enough to say you "research far right extremism professionally," then I'd posit that every one of the most active users of /pol/ is more of an expert on it than any pseudo-intellectual making a spurious claim to authority based on their "professional expertise." By that metric, nearly every one of your "research subjects" is more of an expert than you, so if we want a fair assessment of 4chan, we should probably ask someone who uses it genuinely rather than sanctimoniously.
I was a chan user long before I took up this work full time. I didn't say I was a 'disinformation expert', I mostly study mass shooters, would-be terrorists, and violent street groups.
This comment is written in bad faith - generally on HN we try to take what people say at face value. They said they research far-right extremism professionally. The good-faith interpretation is that they do this as part of their job, as that is what "professionally" means.
While their name suggests they might be just as interested in the far-left as the far-right, if you look at their actual publications, they are almost entirely focused on the far-right, and even those rare occasions they do pay any attention to the far-left, it is generally cases of far-right/far-left overlap. So yes, they are an example of people researching far-right extremism for a living.
In fact, there are lots of other university and independent research centres looking into the topic–I cited CRE-X as an example only because they were at the top of my Google search results. It is something government research funders in many countries want to invest in, and there are also various wealthy philanthropists and charity/activist/lobby groups willing to put money towards it. Nothing unbelievable about someone claiming to do it professionally, because people do.
Lots of people work in this space. How do you expect anyone to write or teach about such a topic without performing research? Keeping an eye on 4chan/pol/ is the least interesting part of my work, because while it's the largest community of its type it functions mainly as an amplifier/dumping ground rather than a source of much original content. /g/ is a much more enjoyable community to participate in.
>But they have never been "far right" in the way that the traditional racial supremacy kind of neo nazis are.
There is no way you are talking about /pol/. I refuse to believe you have spent any amount of time on /pol/ and haven't seen the countless race IQ charts.
The_Donald was (1) banned and (2) not the official politics forum. It's more like characterizing Reddit as a whole as left-leaning because /r/politics is, which is, in my book, a fair claim.
I mean the goofiness comes from "what are the politics of a website" being inherently kind of a strange question with no clear answer. The motivations and values of the people who run these sites are mostly not legible to us. We can look at what the sites are used for.
If someone is using their own money to host a forum for neo nazis it's very coherent to describe this behavior as, at the very least, supporting neo nazis. If they are also hosting a motorcycle forum with their money, does that cancel out the neo nazi support? Is it reasonable to say either site IS a nazi forum?
What if most but not all members of the motorcycle forum are also nazi forum members? What if only a few of them are? What if they share login systems and comment histories?
There aren't clear boundaries between these things. The nazi forum is definitely a nazi forum. Whether the motorcycle forum is a nazi forum depends on how much userbase and culture and branding they share, and how high your tolerance for nazis is; an individual assessment without an objective answer.
I thought Stormfront was the big website for them? /pol/ is a bunch of nutters but it's not well organized. Arguably there's more visible White Nationalism on Twitter.
