Weaponized Autism Study

Abstract
The discussion-board site 4chan has been part of the Internet’s
dark underbelly since its inception, and recent political events
have put it increasingly in the spotlight. In particular, /pol/, the
“Politically Incorrect” board, has been a central figure in the
outlandish 2016 US election season, as it has often been linked
to the alt-right movement and its rhetoric of hate and racism.
However, 4chan remains relatively unstudied by the scientific
community: little is known about its user base, the content it
generates, and how it affects other parts of the Web. In this
paper, we start addressing this gap by analyzing /pol/ along
several axes, using a dataset of over 8M posts we collected
over two and a half months. First, we perform a general charac-
terization, showing that /pol/ users are well distributed around
the world and that 4chan’s unique features encourage fresh
discussions. We also analyze content, finding, for instance,
that YouTube links and hate speech are predominant on /pol/.
Overall, our analysis not only provides the first measurement
study of /pol/, but also insight into online harassment and hate
speech trends in social media.

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interesting