Free Republic

A Cubs fan who flashed a hand gesture associated with white supremacists has been banned for life by the Cubs in the latest incident that shines a light on Wrigley Field’s longstanding reputation for racist behavior. After a daylong investigation Wednesday, the Cubs found the fan who used the gesture behind NBC Sports Chicago reporter Doug Glanville during Tuesday’s broadcast. Team president of business operations Crane Kenney says the fan, who was not publicly identified by the Cubs, will be banned from Wrigley Field. During the game Tuesday, Glanville, who is black, stood beside the Cubs’ dugout, talking on-air...

You may not have heard of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but, among anime fans at least, it’s a pretty big deal. Originally a series of light novels, it follows the adventures of typical high schooler Kyon and the time-travel alien ESP club he is forced to help create by his beautiful if eccentric friend, the titular Haruhi. Since its original run in 2003, it has spawned 10 additional volumes, a film adaptation, several video games, and even its own religion, Haruhiism. It was first adapted into an anime back in 2006. The show only lasted three months but there...

Twitter has suspended hundreds of accounts after users on pro-Trump Reddit forum r/The_Donald coordinated efforts to set up 'non-player character' profiles mocking liberals on the social networking site. The trolling campaign was born out of the characterisation of liberals as automatons incapable of independent thought on areas of Reddit and 4chan. In 24 hours there were more than 30,000 uses of the term NPC on Twitter, and Facebook pages dedicated to the trend have amassed tens of thousands of followers. So what is an NPC? It's a video game reference. Non-player characters (NPCs) are controlled by the game's artificial intelligence...

Last week, a trolling campaign organized by right-wing internet users spilled over onto Twitter. The campaign, which was born in the fever swamps of 4chan and Reddit message boards, involved creating hundreds of fictional personas with gray cartoon avatars, known as NPCs. These accounts posed as liberal activists and were used to spread — among other things — false information about November’s midterm elections.

Swift’s endorsement is not without commercial risk. According to an analysis by the New York Times, she is most popular in rural areas in the West and Midwest that tend to vote conservative, like Utah, Montana and Nevada, and only modestly popular in Tennessee...."OUR GIRL no more," one posted. "They took her from us and turned her into one of their brain dead zombies," another wrote.

A lot of stupid rumors have bubbled up from 4chan's anonymous internet forums over the years, percolating through the public consciousness and wafting into national news headlines before they inevitably evaporate back into obscurity, leaving reality just a little more polluted. Remember the one about the CIA supposedly mistaking 4chan fan-fiction for a dossier of Russian intelligence? Or the one where a 4chan regular, "QAnon," was supposed to be secretly allied with President Trump in a war against global evil? All were nonsense. All made the news, regardless. Remember the one - just Tuesday, actually - where a 4chan user...

A woman who has accused Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee, of sexual assault has given a Senate panel sworn statements from four people aimed at backing up her allegation, while a lawyer said he had details about a new allegation by another woman against the judge. Lawyer Michael Avenatti said on Twitter he has submitted a sworn statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee from a woman accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. Reuters was not immediately able to verify the substance of the woman’s allegation. Avenatti also represents adult film star Stormy Daniels, who previously filed suit...

A poster at 4chan made an unconfirmed claim Tuesday morning that he and his girlfriend punked porn star attorney and Trump antagonist Michael Avenatti. The two said they were behind Avenatti going public with an outrageously false story accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his prep school classmate Mark Judge of plying women at school era parties with drugs and alcohol so they could be gang raped by a “train” of men.

Update: Avenatti denies he was punked by 4chan trolls. Asked @MichaelAvenatti about the rumor his new client is a hoax: “It never happened. None of it. No truth to it. This is a fabrication of the right because they are worried and they should be." — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 25, 2018 A poster at 4chan made an unconfirmed claim Tuesday morning that he and his girlfriend punked porn star attorney and Trump antagonist Michael Avenatti. The two said they were behind Avenatti going public with an outrageously false story accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his prep school...

Attorney Michael Avenatti on Tuesday dismissed a rumor that he had been duped by a 4Chan user with fake allegations about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. "There is a rumor being floated that I was 'duped' or 'pranked' by a 4Chan user re Kavanaugh," Avenatti, who has said he has a client with claims to make against Kavanaugh, tweeted Tuesday. "This is completely false. It never happened; it is a total fabrication. None of it is true." "The right must be very worried," he added. "They should be." A 4Chan user posted earlier Tuesday that his girlfriend reached out to...

So to sum up, rumors are flying Michael Avenatti, the creepy porn lawyer, locked his Twitter account because his supposed Kavanaugh victim is a prankster off 4Chan that successfully trolled him.

Researcher Mark Burnett is a world authority on passwords. Think I’m kidding? He has collected millions of passwords over the last couple of decades, and has written a book about the real-life password analyses he has done. It shouldn’t be any surprise then to hear that he’s the kind of guy who’s familiar with the different way people choose passwords - including those who think they can generate a really random password by just mashing their keyboard like a crazy man. Enter the bat-shit crazy QAnon conspiracy theory, which - amongst other things - believes that there is a huge...

https://twitter.com/Gingrich_of_PA/status/1029559100592599046 https://twitter.com/Gingrich_of_PA/status/1029539932539375616 https://twitter.com/Gingrich_of_PA/status/1029546205137666048 https://twitter.com/Gingrich_of_PA/status/1029551705376088064 https://twitter.com/Gingrich_of_PA/status/1029557476771995650

In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's message board. Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

In a large-scale analysis, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Cyprus University of Technology and University College London reveal fringe communities within Reddit and 4chan push the use of URLs from archive services to avoid censorship and undercut advertising revenue of new sources with contrasting ideologies. "Web archiving services play an increasingly important role in today's information ecosystem by preserving online content," said Jeremy Blackburn, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences. "News and social media posts have been found to be the most common types of content archived. URLs of...

This is just my take on the entire Q Anon situation. I attempt to break down what Q Anon is, who created and who took it over.

Reddit has become the latest social-media platform to admit that Russian propaganda was used on its site during the 2016 US presidential election. It follows leaks from news site The Daily Beast showing a Russian troll farm active on the website. Co-founder Steve Huffman said that it had removed "a few hundred accounts" suspected of being of Russian origin. In a blogpost, he said "indirect propaganda", which was more complex to spot and stop, was the biggest issue. "For example, the Twitter account @TEN_GOP is now known to be run by a Russian agent. Its tweets were amplified by thousands...

PARKLAND, Fla. 4:30 p.m. A law enforcement official says he knows of “no known ties” between the suspect who confessed to a deadly mass shooting at a Florida high school and a white supremacist group. Lt. Grady Jordan is a spokesman for the Leon County Sheriff’s Office in Tallahassee, where the white nationalist militia known as the Republic of Florida is based. Jordan said Thursday that his office has arrested militia leader Jordan Jereb at least four times since January 2014 and has been monitoring the group’s membership. He says his office has “very solid” information on the group and...

Wild conspiracy theories have a way of seeping into public discourse these days, thanks in part to the divided nature of U.S. politics, the growth of websites that actively promote them, such as InfoWars, and the capacity for fake news to spread virally on social media without any fact-checking or oversight. Enter “Q.” In late October, just days before a different InfoWars-inflated conspiracy—about anti-fascist protesters plotting a civil war—was about to fizzle, a user identified as Q on the imageboard website 4chan started posting vague, portentous messages related to an approaching “storm.” The user claimed to be a high-level government...