4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community
September 18, 2023
We present two studies of online ephemerality and anonymity based on the popular discussion board /b/ at 4chan.org: a website with over 7 million users that plays an influential role in Internet culture. Although researchers and practitioners often assume that user identity and data permanence are central tools in the design of online communities, we ...
Raiders of the Lost Kek: 3.5 Years of Augmented 4chan Posts from the Politically Incorrect Board
September 18, 2023
This paper presents a dataset with over 3.3M threads and 134.5M posts from the Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) of the imageboard forum 4chan, posted over a period of almost 3.5 years (June 2016-November 2019). To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest publicly available 4chan dataset, providing the community with an archive of ...
What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?
September 18, 2023
Over the past few years, a number of new “fringe” communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false ...
A Quantitative Approach To Understanding Online Antisemitism
September 18, 2023
A new wave of growing antisemitism, driven by fringe Web communities, is an increasingly worrying presence in the socio-political realm. The ubiquitous and global nature of the Web has provided tools used by these groups to spread their ideology to the rest of the Internet. Although the study of antisemitism and hate is not new, ...