[at_a_remove]

I agree with the first half but not the second.

4chan has largely been a place where people can express counter-culture views. Whoever and whatever could not be criticized in public, that was the place to do it it.

The left is currently unable to directly admit to themselves that they are in power (they teeter on awareness of it: where once they were concerned about tone-policing and voices being silenced they now say things like "deplatforming works") in the universities, the news, the entertainment media, and so on. And so 4chan (although largely /b/ and /pol/) is the place where you can tweak the noses of the left just as it was once the place to tweak the noses of the Scientologists, the right, and so on. Should the pendulum actually swing the other way, you would see the shift.

My archives of the chans dates from 2005 onward. You can see the expression of what was "naughty" shift one way or another tacking into any political or cultural wind.

In any case, 4chan's "solution" has been to simply embrace the idea of Eternal September and say, "it's up to YOU to ignore things you do not like." Having watched various communities succumb to stifling moderation like HOAs descending into controlling nightmares, I would say that there's a very crude wisdom to the approach.