There is no way to study 4chan. It's like an electron, if you measure it, it's position will change and you'll be back to the start.<p><i>the majority of /pol/ posts (about 84%) are either neutral or negative</i><p>They are looking at a board full of "trolls trolling trolls" as they like to put it and then coming to the conclusion that everyone is negative. The leap then is when it comes to tying it to hate speech in the same context as would be elsewhere.<p><i>“Nigger” is the most popular hate word, used in more than 2% of posts, while “faggot” and “retard” appear in over 1% of posts.</i><p>I submit, based on my experience with /b/ in the past, that there is a different context behind the use of these words on 4chan versus the rest of the world. In fact in both of those cases a poster, typically "OP" is called one of those terms, viscerally and without thought for content or demographic makeup (largely because it's not known). So for example if you post a picture that is silly or not particularly relevant then a string of "OP is a faggot" comments will commence in an almost ritualized manner.<p>Further, it's only in the rarest cases that someone from outside of 4chan finds their way to any one of the boards (not crawled by google AFAIK) and then posts something, not understanding the community, it's like metafilter in that way. It's a self selected group of trolls, hackers and curious people. So I think this study comes to the wrong conclusions:<p><i>However, we are confident that our findings can serve as a foundation for interesting and valuable future work exploring fringe groups like the alt-right, hate speech, and online harassment campaigns</i><p>Extremely doubtful. 4Chan would be considered a "Chaotic Neutral" character. They do terrible stuff and great stuff, but no group can harness it for their own purposes. "Not your personal Army" is a common theme - which the study didn't even pay attention to. If the group smells blood they will attack, no matter who it is or what cause, "4 teh lulz." I mean that's where "Anonymous" basically originated.<p>This is a great example of how embedding yourself into a culture is the only way to understand it - which these researchers didn't do.