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4chan reditr9/5/2023 The data sets covered activity on the three platforms between 30 June 2016 and 28 February 2017, with a few gaps due to web crawler failure. The researchers analyzed more than 400,000 tweets, 1.8 million posts and comments on Reddit, and 97,000 posts and replies on 4chan that contain URLs from 99 news sites. The content and talking points are refined until they finally break free and make it to larger, more mainstream communities. One of the researchers, Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor of computer science in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences, told that the smaller, fringe communities on Reddit and 4chan are where many alternative news pieces incubate before spreading to mainstream platforms: The paper focuses on Twitter, 4chan and Reddit because in spite of their differences, all three are generally accepted as being drivers of substantial portions of the online world because of anecdotal evidence that specific sub-communities within Reddit and 4chan act as incubators of fake news and because all three have a big impact on people’s opinions and actions when they spread fake news. This is the first large-scale measurement of how mainstream and alternative news flows through multiple social media platforms. The researchers found that tightly knit, highly active fringe communities are an important part of our current news ecosystem and often succeed in spreading alternative news to mainstream social networks and the greater web. ![]() They analyzed millions of posts to measure how mainstream and alternative news flows between those platforms. The researchers studied mainstream and “alternative” news shared on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan, with the aim of finding out how “misleading, false, or agenda-driven information” spreads online, leaving swathes of duped people in its wake. ![]() The results of the study were published last week in a paper at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in London. That’s the finding of a study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Cyprus University of Technology, University College London and Telefonica Research. In fact, alt-right communities within 4chan and Reddit are veritable hatcheries from which crawl a surprisingly large number of the headlines that eventually infest Twitter. Reading the output of what the Guardian once dubbed the “ lunatic, juvenile, brilliant, ridiculous and alarming” 4chan community can melt your brain.īut you’ve got to hand it to them: the site that persuaded web users to microwave their iPhones has always been good at clogging up the internet with its memetic fatbergs. ![]() PizzaGate is only one of a long lineage of fake news spawned on 4chan’s message boards. Trump and 4chan’s far-right fringe message board… and which wound up confabulated into PizzaGate by somebody on 4chan who connected the phrase “cheese pizza” to pedophiles, who use the initials “c.p.” to denote child pornography on chat boards. It started with hacked emails on WikiLeaks… which got scoured for political wrongdoing in the Clinton campaign staff by a popular Reddit forum dedicated to Donald J. But it wasn’t luck that planted the so-called “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory in his head: we can credit a particularly dark corner of 4chan for that. The judge said at the time that it was “sheer luck” that Edgar Maddison Welch didn’t kill anybody. In June, a 29-year-old man who fired a military-style assault rifle inside a popular Washington pizzeria, wrongly believing he was saving children trapped in a sex-slave ring, was sentenced to four years in prison.
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