ALongitudinalMeasurementStudyof4chan’sPolitically.pdfVIP

A Longitudinal Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web Gabriel Emile Hine?, Jeremiah Onaolapo?, Emiliano De Cristofaro?, Nicolas Kourtellis , Ilias Leontiadis , Riginos Samaras?, Gianluca Stringhini?, Jeremy Blackburn ?Roma Tre University ?University College London Telefonica Research ?Cyprus University of Technology arXiv:1610.03452v1 [cs.SI] 11 Oct 2016 ABSTRACT Although it has been a part of the dark underbelly of the Internet since its inception, recent events have brought the discussion board site 4chan to the forefront of the world’s collective mind. In particular, /pol/, 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” board has become a central ?gure in the outlandish 2016 Presidential election. Even though 4chan has long been viewed as the “?nal boss of the Internet,” it remains relatively unstudied in the academic literature. In this paper we analyze /pol/ along several axes using a dataset of over 8M posts. We ?rst perform a general characterization that reveals how active posters are, as well as how some unique features of 4chan affect the ?ow of discussion. We then analyze the content posted to /pol/ with a focus on determining topics of interest and types of media shared, as well as the usage of hate speech and differences in poster demographics. We additionally provide quantitative evidence of /pol/’s collective attacks on other social media platforms. We perform a quantitative case study of /pol/’s attempt to poison anti-trolling machine learning technology by altering the language of hate on social media. Then, via analysis of comments from the 10s of thousands of YouTube videos linked on /pol/, we provide a mechanism for detecting attacks from /pol/ threads on 3rd party social media services. 0. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The web has a lot of dark corners, and since 2003, 4 has been considered one of the darkest. Known for memes, trolling, and more, 4chan is an anonymous bulletin board system. 4chan has most recently come under pub