4Chans

According to the cross-section of bans provided to New York, which were issued in the days after the Buffalo mass shooting, 21 bans were imposed for violating US law. Some of those were, as 4chan pointed out to the Attorney General’s Office, for counseling for further terror attacks. The posts encouraged fellow 4chan users to kill politicians, journalists, law enforcement officials, Jewish and Black people, and to target Pride events. In practice, however, the majority of calls for violence on 4chan do not result in bans.…

Microsoft inadvertently learned the risks of creating racist AI, but what happens if you deliberately point the intelligence at a toxic forum? One person found out. As Motherboard and The Verge note, YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI language model using three years of content from 4chan's Politically Incorrect (/pol/) board, a place infamous for its racism and other forms of bigotry. After implementing the model in ten bots, Kilcher set the AI loose on the board — and it unsurprisingly created a wave of hate. In the…

Vile online abuse escalated into accusations she was to blame for the outbreak of covid-19 in Malaysia, death threats, and eventually being arrested and charged with “insulting Islam.” Earlier this year, she fled to Australia to escape a court hearing.Although Nur Sajat’s story is by far the most high-profile, it is just one of many that illustrate how online platforms have evolved into a double-edged sword for Malaysia’s LGBTQ communities.  Despite creating invaluable opportunities for LGBTQ people to connect,…