Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech first", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much higher than Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.
Other work also focuses on characterizing relatively small alt-right Web communities. Specifically, @cite_2 study 4chan's Politically Incorrect board ( pol ), and show that it attracts a high volume of hate speech. They also find evidence of organized campaigns, called raids , that aim to disrupt the regular operation of other Web communities on the Web; e.g., they show how 4chan users raid YouTube videos by posting large numbers of abusive comments in a relatively small period of time.
@cite_2
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The discussion-board site 4chan has been part of the Internet's dark underbelly since its inception, and recent political events have put it increasingly in the spotlight. In particular, pol , the "Politically Incorrect" board, has been a central figure in the outlandish 2016 US election season, as it has often been linked to the alt-right movement and its rhetoric of hate and racism. However, 4chan remains relatively unstudied by the scientific community: little is known about its user base, the content it generates, and how it affects other parts of the Web. In this paper, we start addressing this gap by analyzing pol along several axes, using a dataset of over 8M posts we collected over two and a half months. First, we perform a general characterization, showing that pol users are well distributed around the world and that 4chan's unique features encourage fresh discussions. We also analyze content, finding, for instance, that YouTube links and hate speech are predominant on pol . Overall, our analysis not only provides the first measurement study of pol , but also insight into online harassment and hate speech trends in social media.