4chan and 8chan – Monitoring the Hotbeds of Extremism and Radicalism

Unless I&#x27;m missing something, 4chan and 8chan are both available on the clearweb still - it seems like the article is implying that they&#x27;re both not anymore?<p>Looks like an advertisement for WebHost more than investigative journalism.

&gt; The dark web is believed to be heavily monitored by intelligence and law enforcement agencies who often subvertly operate exit nodes in an attempt to trace the traffic back to its origin.<p>Everyone says this, never quite realizing that hidden services (the .onion links on TOR) don&#x27;t rely on exit nodes, and therefore wouldn&#x27;t be subverted by such measures.<p>They also say that 8chan users are revealing their IP addresses. First, if 8chan is gone from the clearnet, this means they&#x27;re posting to a .onion domain, right? The websites are a bit unclear on this, but Wikipedia seems to imply that 8chan is no longer available on clearnet since August. So how are they divulging their IP addresses?

&quot;This pie chart, extracted from Webhose Cyber data, shows the subject matter of discussions in three leading imageboards: 8chan, 4chan, and endchan.&quot; I liked the pie chart that comes right after, pretty cool, it&#x27;s like they can tell the site DNA by looking over the different threads. From my experience, dark web can be anywhere ... saw it in gaming chat platforms or even portals that nobody will believe. I truly believe that the *chans are part of the extremist&#x27;s hotbeds and I know for sure there are more out there more anonymous and well hidden. Rumors recently mentioned around Zeronet and Telegram.

Radicals start their actions with ideas and words spread in one way or another We saw this in gab.ai and the Pittsburgh shooting,which since then closed their gates to the public... Never know where the next shooter will publish his last words before the shooting

Talking about any chan as though it&#x27;s a monolithic entity is a huge mistake. There&#x27;s very little overlap in the users between, for example, &#x2F;ck&#x2F;, &#x2F;tg&#x2F;, &#x2F;fit&#x2F; and &#x2F;pol&#x2F;. The first three can hardly be called hotbeds of Extremism and Radicalism, unless you think that ridiculing crossfit will somehow lead to a second holocaust...

&quot;They are, however, both well-known breeding grounds for radicalism and extremism.&quot; First of all, they are hot beds for the 1st amendment. If you believe in the 1st amendment, then you believe that places where people can voice their opinions, no matter how misled, should exist.<p>Secondly, this journalist has no idea what the darkweb is and should be put on leave until they actually do their research.<p>Lastly, and this is a biggie: If you ban people who talk about terrible things, all you&#x27;ve done is succeed in moving them where they are harder to monitor.

&#x27;Memes we disagree with are literal Terrorism!&#x27;<p>Jfc, is this really the state of affairs today?