[arkona]

> They used 4chan and 8chan — websites linked to the distribution of child pornography — to organise their movement, the FBI says.

What? 4chan is linked to child pornography? This paragraph alone is casting serious doubts on the journalist’s objectivity and seriousness.

[aluhut]

It's not? Since when?

[ericd]

That's like saying the internet is associated with illegal drug distribution because sometimes people buy drugs over it. It's true, but not representative. That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.

[michaelt]

  That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.

Only because a reasonable person would choose a more subjective statement, to convey the full breadth of depravity a visitor could expect to find on 4chan.

I mean, you've also got the gore pics, the incitements to racial and political violence, the fucked-up hentai, the homophobia, the raids on children's games, and the incessant insistence that everyone kill themselves.

[ericd]

Or they might not take it so seriously, and describe it mostly as a bunch of bored immature people trying to blow off steam and entertain themselves and each other. And they take it too far somewhat frequently.

But maybe people at your middle school were more mature than at mine, and never tried to gross each other out by tricking them into checking out this really cool site called goatse.

[arkona]

Since when is it? If there is one thing that will get you banned from 4chan it is posting or requesting child pornography. I am not a fan of much of the content on that website, but linking them to child pornography looks like a smear job.

[hyperpape]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Arrests_for_child_pornog...

[aceofspad4s]

How many arrests have happened because of CP posted on, say, Facebook? Or on Reddit? Is there any proof that CP is more likely to be posted on the 4chan imageboard than anywhere else on the Internet? Do you think the owners of 4chan somehow encourage the posting of CP?

[hyperpape]

Literally the first discussion I had with a friend who used 4chan, a decade or so ago, was about how people posted lots of child porn on /b/, but it typically got removed.

It doesn’t matter who encourages what. The mods obviously don’t like it, but somehow 4chan spent years attracting tons of people who love to post child porn.

[deadmetheny]

It's just as possible to post CP on any other web forum that allows images to be uploaded. Uploading illegal content has always been a rule on 4chan and has always lead to a rapid ban and report, attempting to pin 4chan as being complicit in spreading CP is a baseless smear.