TIME seemingly blames 4chan for Buffalo

But without actually invoking 4chan’s name directly.

From their article on Apple News:

“The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto is covered in anti-Semitic and racist memes and disinformation, making it tempting to characterize it as the delusional ravings of a madman. But such documents, however abhorrent, need to be understood as part of a coherent political ideology, former U.S. extremism officials and experts tell TIME—one whose reach extends far beyond fringe Internet forums. About 1 in 3 U.S. adults believes an effort is underway to replace white Americans with immigrants for electoral gains, according to a new poll, “

“Anti-Semitic and racist memes”? Sounds like Pepe to me. “Fringe Internet forums”? Nearly every conspiracy theory that has gained traction in the last couple of election cycles has originated on 4chan.

Stormfront got shut down because of this exact same racial hatred enabling behavior resulting in murder. It’s about time 4chan did too if they can definitively connect the shooter’s actions to propaganda on the site. And no needs to pussyfoot around calling out that site. It’s high time the mainstream media did put it on blast.

Yet, no mention of Facebook and Twitter, where he streamed his spree at? Seems legit.

If the sale of Tw to a certain individual was finalized, you can bet it would be blamed but now it isn't prudent.

Oh for sure. No doubt about this. This is just woke companies trying to exploit the situation to go after groups outside of their bubbles.

I bet TIME has a lot of racial crap in their recent history that they're not taking responsibility for as well. Like the kind of shit that triggered the Waukesha killer.

More conspiracy peddling from the alt-right. You think Time is threatened or normally concerned with 4chan? Both have been around for decades at this point. 4chan is partially--significantly--responsible for this and is relevant to the situation (Time could have gone after them at any point in the past), and no one would be wrong for going after them right now.

This is not the hill you want to die on right now.

what kind of fucking idiot goes out and shoots people because of what they read on the internet?

@comp_atkins: You’d be surprised…

FoxNews is blaming video games rather than address their own messaging toward their viewers.

Trump voters and GOP rubes, probably.

4chan is a place for losers but being a loser isn't a crime as far as I know. Now, for sure there needs to be an investigation regarding bad actors that exploit it to radicalise those losers. Imo is akin to Imans who radicalise Islam, they need to be shut down.

it boggles my mind how many willing idiots there are around... how many people chomping at the bit to be the tool of some other dopes on the internet to advance their "cause".

yet a lot of these some idiots are the ones out there shouting that they're "free thinkers" or that everyone else just needs to "open their minds"

imagine murdering innocent people and throwing your life away over internet posts.

JFC....

We're not blaming grand theft auto anymore? I mean it's gotta be someone else's fault and not the nutjob who actually made choices to end lives.

Man we need to figure out who REALLY is to blame.

its the MSM fault...places like time, facebook, IG, twitter. Places that ban hate speech and drive it under ground. Hate speech is still free speech, let that sink in. Censorship just drives these people underground. They need to be exposed in the open.

@girlusocrazy: your right. Nowadays these kinds of places don't even need to be underground, they can operate in the open. But normal people would never go there anyway. I don't.

@sheevpalpamemes: I'm ok with almost anything, except fake news lol.

Free speech applies ONLY to government restrictions. Why do so many use free speech and yet not know what it really means?

I have a very hard time buying the idea that this guy wouldn't have gotten violent if it wasn't for stuff he read on the internet. There's some serious corellation != causality going on here.

Correct. Like when people go on facebook and complain about being moderated because they used their "freedom of speech".

Private entities don't need to abide by it.

@appariti0n: QAnon in concert with other fringe groups stormed the Capitol, assaulted officers, and were looking to harm government officials. QAnon was a 4chan maneuver. So yeah, people can get radicalized by stupidity on the net.

I mean, when as soon as you hear about it and your response is "probably from 4chan" to be confirmed about 1 day later "from 4chan", something might be wrong.

To be clear, I liked and use 4chan. It's wrong to use a broad brush-stroke and deem everything on it bad apples, as it's basically a "anything and everything board".

Basically /pol/. Alot of the 8chan folk hang around there now.

Loop of

Racism > Racism? Racism > Racism> Shock imagery footage Racism > Racism> Racism > Racism> Shock imagery footage > Trump awesome Racism > Racism > Racism > Racism> Shock imagery footage Racism > Racism>Racism > Racism> Shock imagery footage > Trump awesome > Russia great> Z wow!

Etc... etc... etc..

Funny thing is for all the attempts at edge-lord, after visiting a few times, just gets repetitive as all hell because it is lit, just the same shit in a loop.

But yea, I donno. Not big on censorship. But at the same time, clearly something wrong where you can instantly connect it to them as a response.

The guy sounds like a straight up schizo. Doubt removing 4chan would have helped him and I doubt it made him the man he is now but it certainly a catalyze to his delusional mind.

4chan also has legitimate forums outside of the bad ones that have genuine communities.

Q might have originated on 4chan, but those Jan6 morons got into the cult via Facebook, twitter, youtube videos and fox/oan/newsmax - you know, shit that everyone is using, instead of some fringe forums.

Same with this guy, even if he was a regular radical on 4chan, he acted on it because these views were normalized by the likes of Cucker.

4chan has nothing to do with it, this is part about pushing a narrative that the internet needs to be censored and big government needs to have controls and regulations over who is allowed to say what, which websites you have their permission to visit, and what text you have their permission to read. The shooter in question was making threats to kill people for over a year now. He has been investigated by his school and authorities and neither of them did their jobs. Now they want to push blame off elsewhere. On the internet, on guns, on Tucker Carlson.

So of course it'll happen again, and again, and again, because every time the people in positions with the authority to actually step in, fail to do so, they can just pass the blame somewhere else. What did his parents and the other adults around him do when he beat a cat to death and cut it's head off with a hatchet? That's right, not a fucking thing. Only a moron would try to blame guns, 4chan, and Tucker Carlson at this point.

I'm sure 4chan is part of the stupid echo chamber of morons pushing the replacement nonsense. Idk much about 4chan. It's a shithole, right? Not the only one tho.

I think the problem is that these places are such epic shitholes that real people don't go there so there is no one to tell these bottom feeders they are fucking dumb.

I blame grand theft auto and Call of Duty

Remarkable how the mental state of Gendron is presented as completely irrelevant by the media.

Gendron excelled in sciences, once earning top marks in a state chemistry competition. But he was known for keeping to himself and not talking much. And when he did talk, it was about isolation, rejection and desperation.

“He talked about how he didn’t like school because he didn’t have friends. He would say he was lonely,” said Casado, who graduated with Gendron last year.

https://www.syracuse.com/state/2022/05/buffalo-shooting-suspect-lonely-isolated-with-a-troubling-sign.html

That angle towards failure by society that can't be politically salvaged.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/live-life-creatively/201906/society-is-failing-its-boys

The next best thing how to approach a social issue is to revert to familiar excuses used for decades. Blame the internet, blame imageboards and videogames, but failing to resolve anything. Genuine hypocracy, and at the same time driving home the shame game. It is a parody.

@palasta: This is what happens with most of radical platforms/actors, they prey on the mentally vulnerable.

That's why it's important to not ignore that while people that commit these acts of terror have mental health issues (same could be argue for many crimes), one can't ignore that there are actors/platforms that use this people to act their perverse ideologies for them. It is as important to support these sick people as it is to keep bad actors under check.

It looks like you're trying your hardest to find an excuse to blame people you already didn't like, rather than being objective on the matter. You are demanding people held responsible who had nothing to do with it based on your pre-existing biases towards them. So much hate cannot be healthy.

@eoten: Seems like you are trying too hard. :D

You sound like you are writing your own manifesto, and describing who you blame for all the world's problems. Like I said, all that hate is unhealthy.

First off, you saw how Joyce Beatty inserted her foot into her mouth yesterday regarding the Dallas hair salon shooting? If not, check it out.

It doesn't need to be a conspiracy theory when people believe the government could screw up a one car funeral. This entity weeding out truth from falsehood? Determining what is right and wrong? The very same entity whose people can not give a god damned straight answer to a question?

Unfortunately hate will never cease to exist. Find a way to stop it and most of the world's problems would disappear. Think about how often you hear a parent claim they never took their child to be a nut. Really? They couldn't see certain tells. Your child isn't the little angle so many of these parents claim after the kid does something horrendous.

Doubt it, he's not yet another far right shooter. They love their manifestos stating they did this shit due to their crazy far right conspiracy theories. Odd ad-hom to make, as someone who has been defending the shooter for days now.

Sure they were also mentally ill and MOST of the blame goes towards the individual, but this kind of twisted ideology certainly doesn't help and is the last stuff you want unstable people reading. It IS a contributing factor whether you like it or not. Going on about their right wing theories that directly lead to these attacks for 100's of pages, yeah you can't just brush that under the rug.

Looks like the alt-right posters here learned nothing after pizza-gate, Charlotsville, Charleston, El Derado, Christchurch, Tree of Life, etc.

P.S. Why are mainstream Republicans and conservative hosts repeating white supremacist theories? Lets say they deserve zero blame, isn't that still bizarre? You know you're in the wrong when you sound like a white supremacist terrorist's manifesto.

This is a Republican / FOX problem. Their irrational obsession with getting a gun into the hands of every moron, along with their racist propaganda caused this.

@tjandmia: guns and self defense save far more lives per year than the nutjobs who get them and use them for ill means. so yea. there is an inherent quality of people who want to live, and defend themselves from ill will. look up legal firearms owners and legit cases, rather than just hyper focus on criminals.

Oh, yeah? Demonstrate that. The FBI says guns are rarely used for self defense.

Far more lives are lost due to guns than used in self defense.

The 2021 National Firearms Survey, directed by William English of Georgetown University, surveyed more than 54,000 Americans and identified 16,000 gun owners. They were then asked a battery of questions related to their ownership of firearms. Five methods were used to ensure truthful answers. Mr. English’s survey utilized the largest sample size of any study that has ever been conducted on defensive gun use, being nearly ten times greater than that of the next largest survey.

Mr. English found that “guns are used defensively by civilian firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense (used in 65.9% of defensive incidents), and in most defensive incidents (81.9%), no shot was fired.” Mr. English found that more than half of defensive gun uses occurred in situations involving two or more assailants, highlighting guns’ importance as equalizers. Besides producing an estimate of defensive gun uses, Mr. English also found that:

• 81.4 million adult Americans own guns.
• 57.8% of gun owners are male, 42.2% are female.
• 25.4% of Blacks own firearms.
• Handguns are the firearm most commonly used in defensive incidents (65.9%), followed by shotguns (21.0%) and rifles (13.1%).
• A majority of gun owners (56.2%) indicate that there are some circumstances for which they carry a handgun for self-defense.
• About a third of gun owners (34.9%) have wanted to carry a handgun for self-defense in a particular situation, but local rules prohibited them from doing so.
• 30.2% of gun owners, about 24.6 million people, have owned an AR-15 or similarly styled rifle.
• 48.0% of gun owners have owned magazines that hold over ten rounds.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3887145

So now we have one harvard study claiming self defense use is rare, the FBI saying that defense is rare, but My English's online "survey" of 16,708 gun owners that was extrapolated to 81 million people, claiming 1.67 million self defense uses their entire lives! lol.

Seriously. Does anyone have any real data to counter the FBI and Harvard?

@tjandmia: "Mr. English’s survey utilized the largest sample size of any study that has ever been conducted on defensive gun use, being nearly ten times greater than that of the next largest survey."

I'm beginning to blame all this on the identity politics crap that seems to be spreading like cancer. It's important to understand the difficulties marginalized groups face, but this zoomer notion that the most important aspect of you is your racial or sexual identity is wrong. No wonder this country is splitting apart. We should be far more focused on what unites us then arbitrary and generally made up differences.

@joementia: I agree. I've felt this way for awhile. It's not all zoomers fault though, millennials have pushed it.

Should it come as a surprise? Identity politics and all that crap is meant to drive a wedge between the people and pitch them against each other.

Talking about the feeble minded and mentally ill that are preyed up on by an ideology that deems conflict necessary for progress, stiring and nurturing hatred.

We should be far more focused on what unites us then arbitrary and generally made up differences.

Woman and man are different. Black and white are different. Those are not made up or arbitrary differences. The key is not to ignore, but to explain why differences are there. Real education, not this ideological manipulation and politics tohuwabohu.

You could take it a step further though. The people in the media and in politics pushing all that are straight out of the 60s.

An online survey. Not scientific. Need real data, not Bill Bob and his cousint Skeeter making up stories on the interwebs. Next.

We would have to see a scientific survey/poll of those pushing this particular identity politics (great replacement theory) to confirm the age group.

Aside from age, we know it's mostly Republican.

Nearly half of Republicans agree with ‘great replacement theory’ - The Washington Post