Generally Curious: Thematically Distinct Datasets of General Threads on 4chan/pol/

Abstract

Over the second half of the 2010s, the /pol/ (‘politically incorrect’) forum on the 4chan image board has emerged as a space within which various extreme political ideologies are discussed and cultivated, occasionally informing off-site acts of political extremism. While previous research has often studied this space as a unified whole, it is relevant to more specifically demarcate different publics within 4chan’s /pol/ board, apart from studying it as an ‘amorphous blob’. This paper focuses specifically on ‘generals’ - recurring threads with a specific thematic focus identified by a particular vernacular phrase or tag. By identifying them it is possible to partition the board’s archive into multiple distinct datasets comprising discussions about a particular topic, such as Donald Trump, the Syria war, or British politics. We provide a dataset containing 58,841 opening posts and 13,697,738 replies to those, divided over 329 thematically distinct general thread collections. In this paper we outline our data collection and query protocol, the structure of the data and its rationale, as well as a number of suggested research uses for this new data.

No Space for Reddit Spacing: Mapping the Reflexive Relationship Between Groups on 4chan and Reddit

“…This study is also subject to such generalizations. Doing justice to the complexity of 4chan and (especially) Reddit is troublesome due to their sheer size and variation; for every argument, there will be another board or subreddit to present a counterargument (Jokubauskaitė & Peeters, 2020; Massanari, 2017). As Proferes et al (2021) warn in their meta-study on Reddit research, “each subreddit has their own individual norms and cultures, as well as moderation practices, meaning insights from social phenomena in one subreddit may not translate across contexts” (p. 1).…”

A fringe mainstreamed, or tracing antagonistic slang between 4chan and Breitbart before and after Trump

“…This data is collected continuously (as it is posted on 4chan) by the tool itself and, for the period prior to 2018, supplemented with data from 4plebs.org, a third-party 4chan archive which publishes semi-regular data "dumps" on the Internet Archive, containing all posts made on a number of 4chan's boards, including /pol/. (Merged 4plebs' and 4CAT's datasets have been used in other research on 4chan, too (Tuters and Hagen, 2019;Voué et al, 2020;Jokubauskaitė and Peeters, 2020).) Notably, posts are included even if they are later deleted from the site, as all posts eventually disappear from 4chan itself, as threads are deleted after a period of inactivity.…”

Online to Offline Crossover of White Supremacist Propaganda

“…Tweets from organizations that the Southern Poverty Law Center labels as white supremacist hate groups [19,47] are also included. This dataset filters 4chan /pol/ data, an imageboard known for white supremacy, to posts from users choosing Nazi, Confederate, Fascist, and White Supremacist flags (in the dataset from Papasavva et al [42]), as well as posts in "general" threads with fascist and white supremacist topics (in the dataset from Jokubauskaitė and Peeters [32]). We also include smaller datasets manually annotated for white supremacist ideology from Rieger et al [49], Siegel et al [52], and Alatawi et al [1].…”