00:00People might think of 4Chan as sort of this playful space where memes come from,
00:05but the amount of sincere extremism on there is not to be underestimated.
00:17Who is this 4Chan?
00:30I translated it and hosted it, and a lot of its success has come from the fact that it was very different at the time.
00:37It was this image-based form of communicating that wasn't really quite popular in the US.
00:41This is just a website with different sub-forums where people can post pictures in threaded conversations.
00:49The conversation is raw, it's unfiltered, so you're getting a very truthful conversation.
01:03You judge somebody by the content of what they're saying and not their username, not their registration date.
01:09You can only have something like 160 threads that exist at any given time on a specific board,
01:14and for every new thread that's posted, an old one gets bumped off.
01:20Things like lore cats, so images of funny cats.
01:25You've probably been Rickrolled online, so you clicked on a link.
01:39A lot of the very old stuff was already quite toxic and quite racist, quite misogynist.
01:50How the website is designed is that it really encourages a small, insular group to communicate.
02:01I don't see myself as any more an advocate for anonymity than I do for identity.
02:06I'm just somebody who cherishes having options.
02:08This insular, subcultural way of thinking also really fosters antagonism and hatred towards outgroups,
02:16towards people that don't belong to them.
02:19It also brought forth the anonymous movements, which in a way was quite left-wing and quite progressive.
02:31They were taking down the Church of Scientology and also supported free speech.
02:38A lot of apolitical gamers, young males, were politicized because of the Gamergate controversy,
02:56which to them was a campaign against, what they said, ethics in video games, journalism.
03:02They told me they were coming to kill me.
03:04They told me specifically they were going to castrate my husband.
03:07And this kind of grew into resentment against liberals or social justice warriors,
03:14or what is now more sort of seen as resentment against woke or against cancel culture.
03:28Now with Hiroyuki Nishimura, he doesn't really seem to care about what happens on the platform.
03:38Hiroyuki Nishimura is the founder and CEO of 4chan.
03:46If one place censors things or deletes things, like Christopher Poole did with Gamergate back in 2014,
03:55then it's very easy for users to just create a new image board.
03:59So 8chan was created in response to the Gamergate discussion being banned from 4chan.
04:06We can't prevent people from being radicalized to violence,
04:09but we can address the relentless exploitation of the internet to recruit and mobilize terrorism.
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