[anigbrowl]

/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.

[TechBro8615]

> I research far right extremism professionally

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.

[anigbrowl]

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.

[vulcan01]

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.

[TechBro8615]

I'm skeptical that any such job exists.

[skissane]

> I'm skeptical that any such job exists.

The University of Oslo has a "Center for Research on Extremism" (CRE-X). https://www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/

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.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Realistically, there is reason for an institution in Norway to study far-right extremism, as it can and has happened there. e.g. Utøya in 2011

[skissane]

> The University of Oslo has a "Center for Research on Extremism" (CRE-X)

> I cited CRE-X as an example only because they were at the top of my Google search results

C-REX, not CRE-X. And I didn’t just mangle their acronym once, I managed to do it twice

[anigbrowl]

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.

[brucethemoose2]

Touche, I am not a /pol/ regular. Glimpses of /b/ is about as far as I got, and the Nazism seemed more like trolling and baiting on the surface.