INSIDER’S VIEW: CHAN CULTURE/GAMERS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO MASS HYSTERIA

It is human nature to seek culpability in times of tragedy, however, as the Turkish proverb says, “He who gets up in anger, sits back with loss.”

In recent news, I was quite surprised to see the topic that had been discussed during the 1990s and which was basically concluded in 2008 but being fetched back up again in 2019. Namely, do video games cause violent behavior? Now, however, there is a specific internet subculture thrown into the mix. While the topic of video games causing violence is debunked many times, something new has been introduced into the mix.

In the past few years, a specific website/s has been thrown around: 4chan or 8chan. You might have heard of these websites as “being associated with the mass shooters in recent and past incidents.” We will discuss to see if they are indeed the ones to blame, or is it just another attempt, especially by media and politicians, to shift the blame to protect or line up their pockets.  For those not familiar with 4chan, it is a website that emerged during the early 2000s, and is characterized by its loose moderation “a site where anyone can speak anonymously.” In time, more control was instituted when literal crimes were being committed on some of their boards. However, the idea that anyone can say whatever they want and start discussing in their threads and share images, turned into a cesspool — the meme treasure trove of the internet.

4chan had always been the counterculture; when being right-wing was hip, they were extreme left, and when being left became hip, they became extreme right, and to the level where to some people, Hitler is revered, the holocaust is denied, and quasi facts and very strong propaganda is spread; it is perhaps the largest social experiment of our time in anarchy.

As for 8chan, it was created as a response to what they have seen as tyrannical censorship, and consequently, a lot of 4chan users migrated to 8chan. 8chan’s selling point was that every board would be moderated by their group of people not affiliated with any organization unless the people who registered the board elected to. This of course ended up being completely ‘wild west’ of actual discourse, and on multiple occasions, some of the boards had to be shut down due to criminal activity.  Having said that, it is also a place where I have seen the funniest internet cultural artifacts being born, the said criminals being brought to justice, not by an external authority, but by 8chan members themselves, not to mention the freest, and at times, quite influential movements in the making.

In conclusion, these places should be allowed to exist in moderation, if not, they will continue to exist in underground systems, and we would not be able to monitor them. If we are to control and eliminate these deplorable ideologies, we must do so in the form of debate first and foremost not censorship, not violence.

After all, ideas are supposed to be bulletproof, but nothing is fact-proof.