4chan has a pretty hard and fast rule of contrarianism, in large part because thats what keeps posts from falling off the front page.
They don’t use votes there, posts that get replies move to the front page and fall down until they hit 10th page and disappear if they don’t get any.
As a result, 4chan will go against whatever the largest voices in modern culture are saying, which for over a decade have been the left wing/liberal ideology. Before that, they were very left-leaning because we were in the Bush era where culture was very traditional/right leaning.
Soulg@ani.social 1 day ago
I don’t think it’s predominantly anything, it’s just a bunch of people shit posting
Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Them not doing anything to oust the Nazis allow the Nazis to gather there undeterred. There’s been a few documentaries where prominent members of the community talked about how horrifying it was watching the site make such a hard right wing lurch.
Like a lot of users weren’t aware of the jokes and took the shit seriously.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
That’s called Poe’s Law and I swear it’s a huge reason why Trump became president the first time k. 2016. A ton of his internet presence was just shit posting because no one took his campaign remotely seriously. It was all stupid stuff like “Rubio gets blown the fuck up!! Here comes the Trump Train WOOOOOOWOOOOO!!”
It was all pretty hilarious, until all of a sudden it wasn’t. And you realized people had gone from making jokes to taking it all serious. A few years later and our country’s democracy is on the brink of collapse.
Crazy shit.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Yep, this is basically what happened, I watched a lot of former friends basically develop along those lines.
They shitposted their way into turning into fascists, going from being mostly unserious, performatively edgy, to … being extremely serious, genuinely holding these beliefs.
Like ‘God Emperor Trump’ started off as a joke… then they just went ‘no but 4 real he should be a dictator for life.’
You also really, really cannot place enough importance on QAnon, the meta conspiracy framework, that tries(d?) to pull together all conspiracy theories, along a narrative that Trump is secretly waging a war against subversive satanist pedophile Democrats… this is where the whole 12 D chess thing comes from…
And QAnon was born on, and was suckled by 4chan.
Trump kept giving occasional vague nods, using phrases from the QAnon vernacular and such.
In fact, this is arguably what Johnson is clumsily (he is the opposite of a perma online edgelord like Vance or Musk) trying to reference with the FBI Informant thing, this concept that Trump is actually a secret pivotal player in a scheme to thwart essentially a … literally demonic plot to overthrow the US.
This… the whole reason the Jan 6th insurrection happened was because these morons had been promised basically a religious prophecy that Trump absolutely would win that election, their QAnon dogma made concrete and specific promises akin to an apocalypse cult, and when they did not come to pass, they freaked out, thinking the demons had thwarted God’s current agent of destiny on Earth… Trump.
As opposed to, you know, reality, where Trump is a imbecilic criminal mob boss fraudster and serial rapist and also manchurian candidate with a long established track record of literally scamming his own supporters just constantly.
If anyone thinks I am being hyperbolic here… nope, I’m actually underselling how seriously QAnon is a religion more than it is ‘a conspiracy theory’.
Go look up all the evangelical QAnon prophets that popped up during this time, it arguably constitutes a 5th Great Awakening, in terms of mass waves of revitalization and reinvention of Christian religious fervor in the history of the US.
Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I remember watching the infamous sub thedonald turn from making fun of him into being for him. It was insane.