>>14055512To illustrate, consider the following comment responding to the workshop title ‘4chan and the Alt-Right: how best to study them’:
–‘Study them’. Like fucking animals. These snobbish pseudo-intellectuals deserve to be shot in the street.
Should we as academics fear that a user genuinely believes that we should be shot in the street? Should authorities infer intent to harm from this? How should we feel about it? Should we report it? Should we dismiss it? Or is the user merely ‘shitposting’,1 by saying ironically something an extremist might say? We cannot know with certainty, and would not be able to without contextualising these comments with an individual’s broader activities, online and offline.
>>14055513checked,
The thread’s creator or ‘OP’ began by uploading an image of the workshop invitation. They then posted pictures of three slides from a presentation within the workshop on the spread of memes on social media, including from /pol/. One image presented the audience with examples of prominent /pol/ memes, which many posters found highly amusing. There was otherwise little direct information about the workshop’s content. This was revealing, because in its absence, posters instead shared their imagined assumptions of what the content would be:
–‘4chan is a hateful meme factory, promotes free speech, and needs to be shutdown’. – Academic fags. These people are idiot savants that can’t handle the bantz.
–Goddammit, these people won’t quit speaking their minds and forming their own conclusions. Motherfucker!!! This is literally what the whole conference will be. How can we stop independent thoughts from forming and being represented.
–Today class, we try to understand and define pure, unadulterated chaos in its natural form. Why do they continue to try?
