Making an alt account because I don't want to be misconstrued as 'supporting racism' or something. I did a quick search and it seems like 4chan is definitely not all white people. It may be majority white but I doubt it.

Using the 4chan JSON API, I looked at the /pol/ and /int/ boards to see the range of countries posted. /int/ has posts from 99 unique countries. /pol/ has posts from 100 unique countries, but many of the 'countries' are just labels naming a specific flag, for example "LGBT". (Note that "White Supremacist" is literally a flag/label you can choose... But so are "Tree Hugger", "Anarchist", "Facist", "Hippie", and "Black Lives Matter".) I tried to make a pastebin but their filters didn't like the word "white supremacist" so here's the code instead: https://pastebin.com/9FhDM8Ch

Given the list of countries, I'd say it is nearly impossible that most of these people are white. Some of these people are definitely using VPNs to change their country code, however it's also important to note that many VPNs are banned from posting without a 4chan Pass. They cannot all be VPNs.

Without spending too much time on it, I found two pictures of /pol/ meetups online:

https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/7qt0h5/4chan_pol_mee... https://www.reddit.com/r/Cringetopia/comments/b3ggfx/4chan_m...

(Trigger warning, the second picture shows Nazi symbolism.)

In both pictures people of color are present, and in one picture white people make up 50% of the crowd. This doesn't make what /pol/ says OK and that I don't condone racist speech online, but it does suggest many of the comments in this thread are incorrect about 4chan's demographics. Ultimately we do not know what 4chan's demographics are.

Why did I bother? For a few reasons: I like Chris Poole and to my knowledge, he's never supported bigotry directly, he just strongly believes in the value of online anonymity. It pains me to see people painting him as a racist. Nobody calls Jack Dorsey a racist when racist things are posted on Twitter. I also don't like it when people imply that people who post racist things must by default be white, or that white people are inherently racist, e.g. "4chan is a racist website so they must be all white". I also am quite interested in the topic of online moderation and how we can create spaces that allow for privacy/anonymity while curbing bad actors. For something else interesting on this topic, this paper is about white supremacy present on Twitter: https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/downloa... Note that the paper is from 2016 and white supremacy is still in full-force on Twitter, and really any popular social media site.

user:	jqwizard
created:	April 24, 2021
karma:	29