The 8chan story: Destroyer of worlds
It&#x27;s a mistake to take Internet culture and compare it literally to real-world happenings because the two don&#x27;t mean the same things. Here&#x27;s a simple example of what I mean. In real life: if someone makes a racial slur they know that its offensive and if they continue to act this way we can say with confidence they&#x27;re a racist. But the same actions on an image board can be done by anyone with little consequences.<p>If there&#x27;s no consequences, then that means the words context on an image board is significantly different to the real world. As such, you end up getting kids and other people casually using racial slurs to seem &#x27;edgy&#x27; or rebellious. The question I ask is are any of these people actually racist in real life? If they&#x27;re not knowingly thwarting social norms, and there&#x27;s no harsh consequences for doing so, then I argue the words don&#x27;t have the same meaning as they do in real life. Since that&#x27;s the case-- we cannot say 8chan is a &quot;hate speech&quot; website.<p>Most of the comparisons from mainstream media miss this point, and it only highlights how terribly out of touch these old-timers are with how the youth of today express themselves. To really bring this point home, one of the main benefits of using image boards like 8chan is they provide a safe place where you can freely express your ideas without the fear you&#x27;ve somehow upset some crazy person. Such discussions could never take place on a site like Facebook where behavior has to be hyper-mediated with respect to everyone else.<p>Now to directly address the point of the shooting: recall what happened with Columbine. Shortly after the shooting, these so-called experts started examining the interests of the shooters and they noticed one alarming peculiarity! Both shooters were fond of the video game series &#x27;Doom.&#x27; How many of you have played Doom before? Killed anyone lately? These reductionist arguments always seem to have an agenda to express. In my opinion, the agenda is all about dismissing uncomfortable aspects of how people think and feel about the world, and how they&#x27;ve been treated.<p>I don&#x27;t know why the Christ Church shooter did what they did. But I can tell you with absolute certainty no amount of examining how many times the N* word appears on &#x2F;pol&#x2F; is going to give you any profound insights here. Most of what the shooter put out are actually red herrings designed to make politically correct people go around in circles exactly like we&#x27;re seeing now, and the references to memes made throughout the shooters writings were made in the same way. So if you want to understand why the shooter did what they did, you&#x27;re going to have to dig a lot deeper than blaming it all on a website.<p>&gt;From the link: There’s no room for argument about whether hate-filled internet message boards encourage real-world violence: they do, and none more so than 8chan.<p>Yeah, good reasoning. There&#x27;s no room for arguing about whether this article is wrong: it is, and no more so than in this quote.