ellieintheskywithdiamonds:

zoobus:

antoine-roquentin:

so the FBI, in their investigation of the poway synagogue shooter, got a search warrant for 8chan’s servers, because he’d posted not only about that crime but also an earlier arson attack he’d committed on a mosque. only thing is, since 8chan clearly identifies people responding to posts that a user has made, the FBI outed the tripcode they were using in the messages, making it very easy to see what they were posting. it’s an interesting insight into how western governments do their online psyops:

yes, that’s right, they were trying to stoke fears about russia.

i’m quite certain that this stuff is done regularly across the web. we’ve all heard about the russian and chinese troll farms of course, given how useful that is in stoking tensions, but british intelligence has jtrig and the integrity initiative, south korea’s intelligence agency had a team dedicated to making online posts in the 2012 election in favour of the conservative candidate, america has operation earnest voice under the military’s purview, the centre for strategic counterterrorism communications under the state department, and probably one at every intelligence agency besides. donald trump even went to visit the opening ceremony for one of saudi arabia’s versions. and rest assured, these people have almost certainly read the reams of psychological research on group dynamics.

In case it’s not clear or you don’t want to read the thread, the FBI submitted screenshots of 8chan threads to court, apparently not realizing that although it’s an anonymous message board, replying to your own comments will show a little (You) to mark them as such, as seen here:

The (You) is only visible to the poster. The ID number will also remain the same, so those with ID: 8f4812 are likely employed by the government in some form:

can’t wait until discourse turns into this: