[vim_wannabe]

A bunch of people saw an A-list celebrity do a publicity stunt and wanted to have fun with it.

As far as the "Nazis!" claim goes you need to be able to read between the lines if you want to read an imageboard as trollish as 4chan. And if you want to see who really is behind the posts you can look up the first "He will not divide us" event at a New York museum. Spoiler alert: It's not nazis. ;)

[grkvlt]

A bunch of people decided to do the equivalent of scrawling graffiti over an A-list celebrity art piece. These are people whose, to quote 'pg, only way of making a mark on the world is by literally writing their name. It just seemed childish and immature to me.

[PhasmaFelis]

> have fun with it.

"The trolls started targeting people who went to the protest and, when figuring out their identity, fucking with them for days." https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d7eddj/4chan-does-first-g...

'"I've never had so many people tell me that they wanted to see me die and to kill myself." Then 8chan users got hold of Paper's address. He said they've been harassing his family. "I just got off the phone with my mom and people are basically like calling my house and leaving voicemails, racist voicemails," he said.' https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/what-happens-when-alt...

[jquery]

4chan doesn’t have natural defenses against “normie” invaders that other sites have (moderation, identity), so it developed a potent meta-defense. Anyone who takes the site literally will find themselves extremely confused and upset like your parent post. In the old days it used to be gore posting to make newbies flee. It’s defenses are constantly evolving as paid online agitators try to control the message there (as they have successfully done on other more straightforward platforms that limit free speech yet supposedly have far more resources to prevent shilling). Turns out free speech is very powerful indeed.

[simias]

That's a romantic way to look at it I suppose. As somebody on 4chan for a little more than a decade now I'd say that it slowly moved from an anarcho-libertarian community who loved gratuitous provocation to an alt-right echo chamber, at least as far as the big boards are concerned.

"Hitler did nothing wrong" went from a provocative joke to a political stamement. 4chan is the embodiment of "any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company".

That puts modern 4chan in the somewhat ironic position of being actually on the side of the American government for the most part something I couldn't really imagine 2007 ever endorsing, regardless of the who's in charge.

[acct1771]

Finally, someone with a clue.

4chan behavior is canary in coal mine.

[PhasmaFelis]

Yeah, the problem with pretending to be stupid on the internet is that actual stupid people rally around you and take heart. When you're pretending to be a Neo-Nazi by harassing people just like an actual Neo-Nazi, there's not really a material difference in the lives of the people you're harassing.

Remember that white supremacist march last year where one of the marchers suddenly tore off his white shirt and started crying that he wasn't really a Nazi, he was just doing it for the lulz and everything got out of hand?

[PhasmaFelis]

So the people who tracked down random anti-Trump protesters and their families and bombarded them with thousands of death threats were only pretending to be Neo-Nazis?

That makes it all okay, then.