secondary profile: /u/antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • but you do have to explain how /pol was started on 4chan a day before m00t met Epstein

    I don’t have to, because that’s a whole other story that I didn’t dispute. In fact, perhaps you should explain why you would logically connect these two events in the first place. If Epstein caused/convinced moot to create the board, wouldn’t have these two events happened in the opposite order? What do you think was the actual sequence of events?

    more promoted, and took it under his belt

    It should be admitted that this is only conjecture for now.

    So you can’t make the case that 4chan wasn’t influential.

    That’s ok, because I never even suggested I’d make it. In fact, 4chan may have been the most culturally and politically influential website relative to the size of its userbase.

    As for what I am dead certain happened: 4chan had a large proportion of racist and fascist users before 2011. These mainly congregated on the board /n/ (“News”). Due to the board becoming a hotbed of racism, moot deleted it. The users were pissed off. A few months later, /pol/ was created as a replacement to contain the racist users (one of the rules on 4chan said that racism outside of /pol/ is forbidden; from personal experience I can say this wasn’t enforced too strictly, but it reflects the original intenet). At that time moot met with Epstein. Later on, the fascist board culture was in harmony with the discourse espoused by Trump, and was likely one of the key origin points for pro-Trump cultural discourse. In 2017, the persona “Qanon” started to post on /pol/, and then migrated to 8chan where many Trump supporters followed. According to Frederick Brennan, the founder of 8chan (and recently deceased), the person behind Qanon was Jim Watkins, who had taken over 8chan from Brennan, although I don’t know how solid the evidence for that is, there have been other theories. Also bunch of other stuff happened on 4chan and 8chan, Gamergate, moot retiring, the takedown of 8chan after the Christchurch massacre and subsequent decline of Qanon…

    It’s difficult to connect this all into a neat unified story. Slapping an “it was Epstein” does not actually make sense of most of it. Even if the Epstein-moot meeting wasn’t accidental or inconsequential, what could’ve actually happened, what would’ve been Epstein’s involvement, why do we have no further evidence of it in the emails, and how was it different from the existing fascist board just keeping up being fascist?


  • antonim@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldLet's take it back
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    5 days ago

    Have you read the relevant emails yourself, and do you at least vaguely remember their content?

    Anyway, the contacts between Poole and Epstein have been covered in media quite a lot and I’ve read articles about it, as well as checked some of the documents myself. None of what I’ve previously read and what shows up on google now supports the claim that “4chan was Epstein’s creation”. Epstein met with Poole in 2011, that’s the currently widely confirmed information, and I hope I don’t have to write an essay explaining why that’s not proof that “4chan was Epstein’s creation”.