If there's ever a hornets nest you don't want to fuck with it's 4chan

That certainly used to be the case pre-2012. All the former hactivists have long since left. marriage, kids, real life, etc... Now it's mostly handfuls of edgy boys on cell phones in school and 4chan-GPT creating and responding to threads. I wish I were wrong. The site went mostly dead for about two weeks when USAID was defunded and had to shift funding sources then all the usual re-re-re-re-re-posted topics in /g/ returned. Some of them are on this site too ... inb4 they reply. Adding to this now the general public have the real names, IP addresses and locations of all the moderators so they are less likely to participate in doxxing.

There was a quote, "4chan is where smart people go to act stupid, facebook/reddit is where stupid people go to act smart". That probably needs to be updated.

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whimsicalism 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

idk, 4chan still can have the highest quality of technical conversation (at least on ML) outside of twitter/X —- and yes, that’s including HN. it’s where the llama & mistral weights were leaked

	▲	Bender a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah don't get me wrong, once in a while something interesting is posted. Any time something is said in corporate media to be leaked that is the first ClearWeb site I check to see if someone has posted to a paste/git site.

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mmooss a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

4chan was funded by USAID? Is this an in-joke?

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Bender a day ago | parent [-]

4chan was funded by USAID? Is this an in-joke?

I never said that. USAID manipulate narratives on all popular multimedia and social media sites. Anyone may post on 4chan and anyone with a 4chan-pass may use proxies and VPN's.

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mmooss a day ago | parent [-]

> USAID manipulate narratives on all popular multimedia and social media sites.

I wouldn't be surprised to read that on 4chan, but on HN ... we need some credible citations. :)

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Bender a day ago | parent [-]

Some of the text and PDF's by congress discuss some of the findings but there are other sites that reported on it in the last couple years. [1] Some documents try to justify it [2]. There are countless more documents, mostly in PDF form because people can't HTML for whatever reason. Just use "site:.gov usaid 4chan" on Google. I have more of them bookmarked on my workstation. There are also disinformation documents to counter every document. If this sounds like conspiracies I have some rabbit holes for you. Start with DHS and the Ministry of Truth.

Speaking of misinformation, there are efforts to suggest USAID is actually US AID inferring they are some type of AID organization including putting "AID" in a different color in their logo. A few times a year they contribute small amounts of resources so they can get away with saying it but they are actually the United States Agency for International Development [3] originally meant to sway public opinion in other nations but started targeting people in the USA and its allies.

I think the take-away is that everything on the internet including references and citations are probably misinformation of misinformation of misinformation. I have sympathy for AI trying to ingest all of it.

[1] - https://unherd.com/newsroom/documents-reveal-us-government-a...

[2] - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA14/20190521/109537/HHRG...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...

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Bender 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I should know better than to give an answer that may include people not on the left. It might be time to put my sites back online.

	▲	mmooss 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You know that's a misstatement of the response (and oddly you responded to yourself, not to anyone else): It's not that the citations are of "people not on the left", but of people who are highly partisan for any persuasion (and also that you badly mischaracterize another citation). There are plenty of sources that are credible and not highly partisan. Why be disingenous? Do you have something to lose by an honest search for the truth? Do you not want to look for it? Are you so sure that your narrow political group has the truth and no search is needed?

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hunterpayne a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

USAID is a soft power clearing house for the US government. Long ago, the state department, CIA and DOD were all running soft power operations and in an effort to consolidate them, USAID was created. It is supposed to get people to like the US government. Before Obama, it wasn't supposed to be operating "on US soil" but he changed that. By the time Trump was elected, it would be hard to say that it was effective at its task. If anything, it seemed to be doing the opposite of what it was supposed to be doing.

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mmooss a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm aware of the conspiracy theories, and of course there are plenty of sources that repeat them. The first link is a highly partisan website that is quoting America First Legal, founded by Stephen Miller (yes, that Stephen Miller). The second is not as described: Its aim is to prevent enemy states from conducting propaganda campaigns in free societies, an undeniable danger. Its recommendations are,

1. Raise the cost of conducting malign influence operations against the United States and its allies.

2. Close vulnerabilities that foreign adversaries exploit to undermine democratic institutions.

3. Separate politics from efforts to unmask and respond to foreign operations against the U.S. electoral process.

4. Strengthen partnerships with Europe to improve the transatlantic response to this transnational threat.

5. Make transparency the norm in the tech sector.

6. Build a more constructive public-private partnership to identify and address emerging tech threats.

7. Exhibit caution when reporting on leaked information and using social media accounts as journalism sources.

8. Increase support for local and independent media.

9. Extend the dialogue about foreign interference in democracies beyond Washington.

10. Remember that our democracy is only as strong as we make it.

It's significant that a political faction does everything it can to remove barriers to disinformation, for example using lawfare and other attacks to shut down research into it, using political power to disable the country's ability to protect itself.

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tokai 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]