Disinformation and Photoshop: How /pol/ influenced conspiracy theorists with the Parkland shooting - Polidicks

[QUOTE]Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.” The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings. The posters on anonymous forums, a cauldron of far-right extremist politics, over the next few hours speculated about the shooter’s ethnicity (“Hope the kid isn’t white”) and cracked off-color jokes. They began crafting false explanations about the massacre, including that actors were posing as students, in hopes of blunting what they correctly guessed would be a revived interest in gun control.[/QUOTE] A particularly worrying section: [QUOTE]“We will double down on this being another attack against white interests,” the anonymous person wrote, urging that images of Cruz be altered before posting. “Make them darker in photoshop, and make his lips and nose thicker and wider a small bit,” the poster wrote. “[B]Enough to where he looks even more non-white, but not enough that it’s too noticeable.[/B]”[/QUOTE] Source: [url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/we-studied-thousands-of-anonymous-posts-about-the-parkland-attack---and-found-a-conspiracy-in-the-making/2018/02/27/04a856be-1b20-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html?utm_term=.a3957bb88bd3[/url] I put this in polidicks as there's political intentions behind what pol did here, as clarified later down.the article.

[QUOTE]anonymous chat board 8chan[/QUOTE] huh for once it wasn't 4chan's /pol/

[QUOTE=chipsnapper2;53167090]huh for once it wasn't 4chan's /pol/[/QUOTE] From what I can tell, 4chan's /pol/ tried to chase out the folks that were actually serious about the conspiracy garbage they peddle and they relocated to 8chan's /pol/.

7chan once again proving to be the superior chan

Let's create a hoax to trick people into agreeing that this is a hoax. :thinking:

[QUOTE=Grenadiac;53167099]Let's create a hoax to trick people into agreeing that this is a hoax. :thinking:[/QUOTE] When your life and political philosophy are divorced from facts and morality, then those just become tools to manipulate yourself and others.

[QUOTE=iamgoofball;53167095]From what I can tell, 4chan's /pol/ tried to chase out the folks that were actually serious about the conspiracy garbage they peddle and they relocated to 8chan's /pol/.[/QUOTE] 8chan's /pol/ has a really weird history. The people that came with Gamergate ran the board like a serious political forum for about a month, then Moot basically attempted to do what you said by fucking around with 4chan's /pol/ for a couple of days, and the resulting migration replaced almost all of the original posters on 8chan's /pol/ practically overnight without affecting 4chan's /pol/ much at all.

Holy shit they took a page straight out of Deus ex, where the corrupt news organization doctored their images to spread a specific false rhetoric

[QUOTE=Karmah;53168021]Holy shit they took a page straight out of Deus ex, where the corrupt news organization doctored their images to spread a specific false rhetoric[/QUOTE] They took a page out of the OJ Simpson case where a news publication (I forget which) processed old OJs mugshot to darken his skin a looooot. This sort of thing is more common than you think. It begins at choosing an image to go with your article - 'Obama set to meet UK prime Minister' can have two extremely different meanings depending on whether the article image shows Obama smiling or pissed off.

Yeah,they made a lot of fake conspiracy images where they claimed that the shooter was a registered democrat who was friends with a muslim and an avid ANTIFA. Never mind the fact that they guy they chose had the same name as Cruz,but spelled differently. /pol/ does not care about facts,they have an agenda to push and they will use any tactics to push it.

*chan boards used to be a subversive place where you could make off-color jokes anonymously that you only ironically said. It was a place to vent against everything you hated, and you didn't have to be 100% honest with yourself or anyone else about the things you said. Though things like Project Chanology were cringey (with those masks...), it's evident that the userbase was coming from a place that maintained even a small sense of justice, no matter how absolutist it may have been. Unfortunately, as the people on these boards c. 2007 grew up, the only people left over were the ones who couldn't distinguish the irony from reality and /pol/ and /b/ became havens for the alt-right/neo nazis. I think there's a strong correlation between being socially disabled and being part of the alt-right, and the crossover points in that venn-diagram is anonymous *chan boards.

[QUOTE=proboardslol;53169742]*chan boards used to be a subversive place where you could make off-color jokes anonymously that you only ironically said. It was a place to vent against everything you hated, and you didn't have to be 100% honest with yourself or anyone else about the things you said. Though things like Project Chanology were cringey (with those masks...), it's evident that the userbase was coming from a place that maintained even a small sense of justice, no matter how absolutist it may have been. Unfortunately, as the people on these boards c. 2007 grew up, the only people left over were the ones who couldn't distinguish the irony from reality and /pol/ and /b/ became havens for the alt-right/neo nazis. I think there's a strong correlation between being socially disabled and being part of the alt-right, and the crossover points in that venn-diagram is anonymous *chan boards.[/QUOTE] Extremist groups prey on those who feel excluded and attacked, giving them a sense of community at the cost of doing immense damage by giving "credibility" to the voice to popularist power-seekers who ultimately look out only for themselves.

Jesus. What is the purpose of this? If you're intentionally, knowingly lying... Just...why?

[QUOTE=Smug Bastard;53171909]Jesus. What is the purpose of this? If you're intentionally, knowingly lying... Just...why?[/QUOTE] Agendas, boyo It don't matter what it takes as long as you can get the results you want.

[QUOTE=Maloof?;53168038]They took a page out of the OJ Simpson case where a news publication (I forget which) processed old OJs mugshot to darken his skin a looooot. This sort of thing is more common than you think. It begins at choosing an image to go with your article - 'Obama set to meet UK prime Minister' can have two extremely different meanings depending on whether the article image shows Obama smiling or pissed off.[/QUOTE] I remember flipping through the channels several years ago during an Obama press conference and noticing the color temperature that Fox news used made Obama's skin look a much less flattering yellowish color and simultaneously darker.

[QUOTE=Smug Bastard;53171909]Jesus. What is the purpose of this? If you're intentionally, knowingly lying... Just...why?[/QUOTE] /pol/ several years ago? Shits, giggles, kicks, etcetera. /pol/ now? To win in another theater of The Culture War against the Cultural Marxist Globalist Communist Islam-Supporting Jews.

[QUOTE=proboardslol;53169742]*chan boards used to be a subversive place where you could make off-color jokes anonymously that you only ironically said. It was a place to vent against everything you hated, and you didn't have to be 100% honest with yourself or anyone else about the things you said. Though things like Project Chanology were cringey (with those masks...), it's evident that the userbase was coming from a place that maintained even a small sense of justice, no matter how absolutist it may have been. Unfortunately, as the people on these boards c. 2007 grew up, the only people left over were the ones who couldn't distinguish the irony from reality and /pol/ and /b/ became havens for the alt-right/neo nazis. I think there's a strong correlation between being socially disabled and being part of the alt-right, and the crossover points in that venn-diagram is anonymous *chan boards.[/QUOTE] "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." - René Descartes.

[QUOTE=V12US;53173071]"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." - René Descartes.[/QUOTE] I refuse to believe that he actually said that.

[QUOTE=IKTM;53173139]I refuse to believe that he actually said that.[/QUOTE] He didn't, as far as we can tell Actual source: [url]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498[/url]