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What do you think of Internet forum 2channel, where anonymous netizens can post anything, including death threats?

14 Comments

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I think the pervert who launched it should suffer the consequences he's allowing others to threaten. Just how many deviants do we need to read about?

-3 ( +3 / -6 )

It's a great public service. An anonymous board encourages people to reveal things they would otherwise keep secret. And so far as death threats, well nothing is truly anonymous if the police launch an investigation. I can't see how not being allowed to express a death threat would stop someone from killing someone. Just the opposite I would think.

Though I know some people would be happier if every single utterance was controlled by the government, I prefer a society that allows free speech - even anonymous free speech.

5 ( +7 / -2 )

The Internet is no longer just a toy for nerds, it's an essential part of most of our lives. We have to stop legally treating it as separate from real life. When someone threatens the life of someone online, they can track down that person, so we need to treat it the same way as we would crimes in "real" life.

We're seeing in western countries where police continue to make a distinction between online aggression and offline aggression a radicalization of web communities, where anonymous figures with a grudge against say, women in high-profile media positions, can outsource the different tasks of harassment (tracking down personal information, making threats, demonstrating ability to access the victim) across the network. It's only a matter of time before someone gets killed. In fact, depending on how much Dylan Roof's White Supremacist web communities influenced his decision to murder a bunch of innocent black people in Charleston, it's arguably already happened.

I'm glad Japan hasn't gone the same way, but I'm not confident in the future it won't follow, especially if there's another economic downturn to draw out society's lurking uglies. I'd say threatening language online needs to be treated like threatening language offline, and any web community host who doesn't take reasonable steps to moderate their community needs to be held accountable for the actions of its members in it.

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

Dodgy at best. I seem to remember that the founder of the service has lost numerous defamation cases. Freedom of speech is one thing, but using such services to engage in what would amount to a crime in the real world is unacceptable.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

Free speech is free speech. If you don't like it, don't read it.

1 ( +6 / -5 )

You kind of need something like this as a safety valve. Same with 4chan.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Never heard of it, but it sounds terrible

2 ( +2 / -0 )

You could just as well say "What do you think of Internet social network Facebook, where anonymous netizens can post anything, including death threats?"

Last I checked just because you use a handle doesn't make you not anonymous. You don't have to prove your identity to post on Facebook, so it can be just as anonymous if you're tech savvy. And while illegal content may get posted on sites like 2ch, it gets deleted just like it does elsewhere. I'm sure there have been many times more death threats issued on popular social media sites. They just don't have PR teams.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Don't think about it much at all.

Never been there.

Don't plan to go.

Being anonymous online is hard, very hard, even for experts. It is easy to make a tiny mistake that blows everything.

Or ... it is easy - just use the system for NOTHING ELSE except your anonymous stuff. Never use any accounts used on any other system on this "anonymous" system. Using 2 different network cards is important if you dual boot.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

If you don't like it, don't read it.

You're being funny, right?

0 ( +0 / -0 )

I think a lot of the 2chan crowd post on here too.

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

TravelingSalesSEP. 25, 2015 - 10:21AM JST Free speech is free speech. If you don't like it, don't read it.

I don't know of a single society on Earth that considers threats of violence free speech.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

@katsu78

I don't know of a single society on Earth that considers threats of violence free speech.

Google (or use duckduckgo if you don't want to be tracked) 'come and take it' in the US. Look at the pictures.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

This is a really loaded question the way that it's worded. To bias the question the other way, one could have written, "What do you think of Internet forum 2channel, where anonymous netizens can post anything, and have stopped anonymous strangers from committing suicide after they've posted notes?"

Good or bad, I think it's important that people have the opportunity to speak their mind freely somewhere in their lives -- and for the most part, folks talk about much more mundane topics on that kind of site. I agree that on a computer, you're never truly anonymous, but the format is anonymous enough to help people avoid censure at school or work. In the case of threats, there's at least a starting point for police to work from -- and a person writing about an act is not typically a person committing an act at that point in time.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

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