The white supremacist terrorist who killed 20 people in El Paso over the weekend claimed direct inspiration from the Christchurch mosque shootings. Don Rowe explores how our darkest day became an aspirational target for the far right. Scrolling 8chan after another white supremacist terrorist attack was foreshadowed on the site over the weekend I flicked … Read more
Should we increase surveillance of ‘lawless’ online bulletin boards like 4chan and 8chan, and if so, how? Radio NZ’s Max Towle asks 8chan’s founder Fredrick Brennan and New Zealand experts whether the rise of online extremism can be curbed. Fredrick Brennan would open 4chan when he woke, and close it long after dusk, moments before … Read more
Decisions about what speech gets regulated should made by the people affected by these rules. That’s the whole point of democracy, write two Canadian professors. When it comes to dealing with online hate speech, we’ve ended up in the worst of all possible worlds. On the one hand, you have social media platforms like Facebook … Read more
The Christchurch Mosque Shootings saw journalists scrambling the country over to cover the unfolding horror. New Zealand’s subreddit experienced an unprecedented rush too, swamping the volunteer moderators and exposing them to some of the worst reactions on Reddit. We speak to the moderators of r/newzealand. Almost as soon as news broke that a gunman had … Read more
The removal of extremist content alone isn’t going to solve the problem of right-wing terrorism. Instead, we need to harness new technology to find such individuals early and intervene. Last week, 50 lives in Christchurch were lost in another act of terrorism by a white nationalist. This follows 11 dead in Pittsburgh. Nine dead in … Read more
Not for the first time, the bleakest corners of the internet have apparently spawned real world tragedy. What is 4chan, and how does it foment so much hate? Even as the nation was plunged into a whirlwind of shock, horror and grief, there were plenty of online communities that had an opposite, chilling reaction – … Read more