| I've lurked around 4chan more or less my entire life. It remains a vital pulse on the trends and gossip of the internet as a whole and the unfiltered opinions of the international community. I spent a lot of time on there during the election season. Specifically /pol/. It's amazing what the unconscious social reward system can do to groupthink in such a contained, anonymous environment. Most people do not make use of user scripts that allow better threading or quoting, and as such there is so much noise in between the comments relevant to the conversation a user might be following that one has to develop a strategy for ignoring things that aren't relevant. Often this will cause the individual to lump certain responses together and to disregard anything that resembles that lump. This contributes to polarization and hostility among susceptible individuals. There is a lot of hyper-feedback between users of like mind, who are mostly ignoring everyone else. It doesn't take much to go from 'let's all look into this email trove" to "The Clintons are clearly committing criminal acts and hanging out with convicted pedophiles" to "Hillary Clinton sacrifices goats and eats babies" Some people perpetuate an idea as a joke, a fraction of them understanding that others who truly believe the idea will only take it as truth. But there is an attractive sense of comradery in the kind of trolling that goes on there. Many more people could possibly have been agents of various organizations shaping the conversation in certain directions. Certainly, Correct The Record had a large presence on places like 4chan, as well as people jokingly dishing out common CTR lines, to the effect that it was easy for many to believe that whatever the posts they lumped together as "shilling" were against must be true. In addition to CTR spam posts, a lot of posts like "well maybe Hillary doesn't eat babies and Donald Trump is probably lying through his teeth on most of his commitments just like her" fell into that "shilling" category. It was fascinating to watch it happen so fast, just a few planted threads and suddenly an entire board just completely digressed into right-wing Pro-Trump "MAGA" shouting idiots, some of it ironic, some of it planted, but so much of it in earnest. So much memery and shitposting. /pol/ is kind of a horrible place to be now. |