Memes, Radicalisation, and the Promotion of Violence on Chan Sites

Guillermo Suarez-Tangil

Abstract:

A number of violent far-right attacks in recent years have revealed an apparent connection with ‘chan culture’, not just in
the tangible examples of attackers uploading manifestos, final messages and livestreams to chan sites themselves, but in
the widespread community support exhibited in some corners
of this online subculture where violence is both trivialized
and glorified. Commonly, this is manifested in the visual culture present on chan sites, particularly memes, which may be
used to promote extreme or even violent narratives under the
guise of humor and irony. This paper seeks to understand how
the visual culture of chan sites contributes to, and/or encourages violent discourse. We combine quantitative data scraping, ethnography and visual analysis across tens of chan sites
ranging in popularity like 4chan, 8kun, and more niche sites
between March – June 2020. Over all we collect a dataset of
135K images across different chans and provide a first qualitative characterization of the most popular images shared
across different chans.