‘Cheering section’ for violence: the attacks that show 4chan is still a threat – By Justin Ling (The Guardian) / May 1, 2022
The Washington DC shooting was the most recent to spawn out of the extremist culture of unregulated ‘chan’ message boards
When police in Washington DC burst into a fifth-floor apartment building on 22 April in search of a man who allegedly had shot four people at random, they found Raymond Spencer dead by his own hand, a cache of guns and ammunition, and a poster with an ironic white supremacist meme.
The poster invoking the meme, popular on the extremist online forum 4chan, was a stark reminder that this attack blamed on Spencer, 23, was only the most recent mass casualty attack to spawn out of the ugly extremist culture of unregulated internet message boards such as 4chan.
That particular forum gave birth to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is combating a cabal of leftist pedophiles, before it moved on to its even-more-extreme cousin 8chan. QAnon has been particularly effective in crafting the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, inspiring the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021. A bipartisan Senate committee connected seven deaths to the attack.
Alek Minassian, 25, posted an update on Facebook with a direct reference to 4chan and its extreme misogynistic community of so-called incels, short for involuntary celibates, before launching a deadly vehicle ramming rampage in Toronto in 2018. And after New Zealand police arrested Brenton Tarrant, who shot and killed 51 worshippers in mosques in Christchurch, he cited 4chan and 8chan as direct influences.
CONTINUE > https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/01/4chan-extremist-online-forum-raymond-spencer
