A lot of people think 4chan is one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet because they see a lot of racism that would normally be banned anywhere else.
But if you post something that goes against the alt-right that pisses them off too much and getting a lot of replies, it'll be deleted within minutes, or you'll even get banned for being "off topic".
4chan is not free speech, it is just a haven for the alt-right.
They do have rules and the site is quite moderated.
I do think though that any such site or platform will have the issue of judges inflecting their bias in their application of the rules.
So I wouldn't say that it is a unique phenomenon.
That said, of course there is a semantic as well as technical identity to 4chan. And they are quite connected, rather than isolated.
4chan, apart from its lax rules on what we now call hate speech, has developed a community where insults are now part of its culture. The fact that the site is anonymous greatly influences that animosity.
I like to think of 4chan not as a place where horrible people go, but where people go to be horrible. Of course you have the dedicated users, neets or schizos or chronically online, but again that's a propery of every site, and not necessarily a majority.
So if you read /pol/ or /b/ like articles of an organization with an editorial line, sure you will see nazis and a deranged group of people.
If you however see it like bathroom wall writings, you will see a bit of everyone.
There were no rules broken. Actually they selectively ignore the rule against racism as long as it is aligned with alt-right, and not just the pol board now.
That thread is about the Spanish movie "La piel que habito,"[0] and that OP post is actually describing the plot, it's not even a political post. So bringing up American Republicans out of nowhere is quite off topic. Strange how you conveniently cropped out the title and image that ostensibly showed this. Is this the best you can do?
It's not entirely unrelated to the discussion and I guarantee you if someone said something aligned with alt-right, instead it would not have been censored.
An article about 4chan from left media is something I won't read. Not a boomer, I can actually read 4chan anyways and make my own mind.
Image related is unfortunate. Not uncommon for jannies and mods in any website to use their power to self serve. It happens even in more serious and regulated sites like wikipedia, so I'm not surprised by the lack of moderation neutrality in a meme site.
> Image related is unfortunate. Not uncommon for jannies and mods in any website to use their power to self serve.
This isn't just a 1 off thing by rogue moderators is what I'm trying to point out. This is a constantly re-occurring thing. I also experienced the same issue multiple times until I got fed up with it and stopped posting there a few years ago.
Their main moderator had a goal to make 4chan politically aligned with his views. 4chan used to be free speech but it really isn't anymore.
Its not just the pol board as I showed in my other comments.
I don't use the videogame board so I do not know if anti alt-right comments there get deleted, but I find it hard to believe that anybody is going to be emotionally invested enough to delete posts that say "game X is going to succeed even when it is woke".
From a random search it looks like there's a lot of racist or alt-right aligned political comments there that never get deleted though.
This is not true. You can go to /v/ right now and see tons of pro black/trans in video games posters, and /lgbt/ is one of the largest boards on the site at 12th place by avg. posts per day.[0] Here are 3 /v/ threads I found in less than 5 seconds that are "pro woke":
1. 696014001
OP:
>Face it, it’s going to be a BG3 situation. Everyone will screech about it being woke, play it, then 6 months later everyone will say “no one called it woke, what are you talking about?”
2. 696014873
OP:
>If Japanese people are so based and anti-woke then why is this so popular in nipland? [pic of otokonoko game in image]
3. 696016309
OP:
>>9999 games cater to cis men, 1 doesn't
>>THIS IS LITERALLY GENOCIDE
(Two of these threads I found by searching the word "woke" in the catalog. The first was the first thread when I opened the page.)
In fact, these types of threads are against the rules,[1] but /v/ is somewhat evenly split between liberals and anti-liberals and liberals make these threads all day and can be seen in replies as well. They even have their own terms, eg. "Grumzcord Raid" "Grifter thread" etc. And if you knew anything about the mods and janitors you would know many are far from alt-right.
My guess is you went to /g/ and started making blatant political threads and got banned. Note that both sides get banned for blatant off topic political posts. Do you have any examples of posts you were banned for?
The mods won't ban or delete 1 off posts that don't get any traction. And I'm talking about pol, the #1 board on the site by activity.
And no I don't visit g, if I wanted some discussion about technology I'd rather use this website instead. I'm not going to show any of my own examples for privacy purposes, and no doubt you will probably find some way to nit pick at those.
>mods won't ban or delete 1 off posts that don't get any traction
Janitors don't delete posts that they don't see or are not reported.
>I'm talking about pol, the #1 board on the site by activity.
/vg/ is neck and neck with /pol/, and that's only because /v/ was split into /v/ and /vg/.
And yeah, if you don't give any examples it's hard to take you seriously. The example you did give was egregiously OT, and in fact potentially thread-derailing. The fact that you saw that as an example of janitors being unfair puts your credibility into question. I showed that liberal opinions are allowed and even common on 4chan, which was your initial point. I don't browse /pol/ but I found liberal threads pretty easily here as well:
490048710 (99 replies)
OP:
>Calmly explain why pissing off these countries [in OP pic] will result in untold riches for the working class [countries are China, Canada and Mexico, in reference to Trump's tariffs]
490048788 (103 replies)
OP:
>Is Trump the last gasp of a dying empire?
>He's going hard, threatening every country in the world with huge tariffs and massive retaliation if they use currencies other than the US dollar. It's rather absurd. [post continues for another 3 paragraphs]
I don't think 4chan is necessarily a bastion of free speech. Twitter is probably more free in terms on what you can post now. However 4chan is nothing like Reddit, old twitter, YouTube etc. in terms of what you can post.
> Janitors don't delete posts that they don't see or are not reported.
So why is it that any alt-right or racist posts never get deleted? Even if they only deal with things that get reported to them, there's clearly a huge bias going on here when alt-right aligned posts never get reported while the opposite is reported and dealt with within minutes.
> And yeah, if you don't give any examples it's hard to take you seriously. The example you did give was egregiously OT, and in fact potentially thread-derailing. The fact that you saw that as an example of janitors being unfair puts your credibility into question.
I believe I've given plenty of other examples not my own. I don't want to bring in my own examples because I don't want to be arguing about politics on this website, especially since I am not using a throwaway account like you are.
If the example I gave was egregiously OT, then so are all the dozens of race and politic baiting posts aligned with the alt-right that never ever seem to get the same treatment.
And for posts be deleted quickly, it needs to piss enough people off. The examples you used are the most softball examples that are not too aggressively worded and makes it more likely that alt-right users try and refute the claim rather than a knee jerk "report and sage".
Also tariffs are more of a tangential viewpoint rather than one exactly opposed to the alt-right.
But if you post something that goes against the alt-right that pisses them off too much and getting a lot of replies, it'll be deleted within minutes, or you'll even get banned for being "off topic".
4chan is not free speech, it is just a haven for the alt-right.