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![anime protagonist window collage 4chan anime protagonist window collage 4chan](https://cdn141.picsart.com/272644787032201.jpg)
As one user explains, consuming these red pills can be isolating and addictive: The world as viewed through these red pills is degenerate, deranged, and perverse, and cruelly manipulated by a cabal of global elites for their own benefit. These ‘facts’ are carefully crafted chunks of disinformation, often based on misconstrued or de-contextualised statistics, misleading or fake news headlines, and conspiracy theories, and are designed to produce in the viewer a sense of alienation, dissatisfaction, and rage. Posters on /pol/ trade in ‘red pills,’ which is their term for illuminating ‘facts’ or ‘truths’ that, once swallowed, change a person’s perception of the world toward the political right, much as the red pill in The Matrix (1999) allows Neo to see the truth behind the false world around him. The community on /pol/ keeps its participants engaged by stimulating outrage and anger, and by engaging readers in a conspiracist narrative where the far right is the only trustworthy source of information. Within /pol/ there is a strong consensus among users toward far-right ideas in general, with users generally in agreement about ideas such as white supremacy, ethno-nationalism, and conspiracy theories about ideas of ‘white genocide’ and a Jewish New World Order, but there is significant ongoing argument about the movement’s exact goals and how best to achieve them. While the alt-right community has now spread beyond 4chan, the forum remains a central platform for the movement’s discussions, and serves as a key location where individuals who have been exposed to far-right messaging through sources such as YouTube can go to develop a radical identity without any risk of it affecting their ordinary offline life.Īlt-right activity on 4chan is largely confined to one politics-focused board called Politically Incorrect, or /pol/. 4chan was a natural fit for the alt-right because the condition of anonymity allowed users to flirt with extreme ideas without any danger to their offline identity, because the forum’s few rules and lax moderation did nothing to stop the open discussion of fascism and violence, and because 4chan’s trademark dark and ironic humour made serious calls for violence difficult to tell from satirical ‘shitposts’. Most recently, 4chan incubated the initial growth of the alt-right, an internet-based extreme-right movement that rose to prominence alongside Donald Trump’s 2016 US election campaign. This style creates a rapid turnover of content where the most interesting or entertaining content rises to the top, with anonymous users feeling free to experiment without any repercussions for failure. On chan-style forums, users are anonymous by default, and discussion threads are presented in a floating order with the most popular first, with the least popular threads quickly deleted instead of remaining available. The website has an unusual design originally based on a forum called Futaba Channel, or 2chan, which was popular among the Japanese otaku subculture, and which was adapted for use in English by a community of young anime fans (Beran, 2019, pp. 4chan’s community has been responsible, for example, for popularising the first internet memes, the ‘Anonymous’ hacker collective and movement that campaigned against the Church of Scientology, and helping to build support for the Occupy Movement. 4chan boasts a large userbase of 22 million unique monthly users (4chan, n.d.), and forms a significant and influential element of contemporary internet culture. Originally designed for the discussion and sharing of anime pornography, by the mid-2000s 4chan evolved into a home for a community of social outsiders built around internet pranks and a tolerance for unusual behaviour and transgressive humour. This article looks at the ‘iron pill’, a form of self-improvement advice that the alt-right community on 4chan provides for its members, and discusses the implications that this advice has for online radicalisation.Ĥchan is a large and popular online forum that has existed since 2003. This process is often better remembered in its negative aspect, where fascist governments purged undesirable groups from the collective body using mass murder, but as new fascist movements emerge on smaller scales without the resources to commit mass murder, it may be best to understand their significance by looking at the more positive aspects that they use to recruit and retain new members.
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Because they are often self-defined by their fetishization of strength, virility, and supposed genetic superiority, these movements seek to reshape their people into a powerful collective using methods that have included sports, exercise, and military training as a means of forming them into the closest possible approximations of their ideals of strength. Throughout their history, fascist movements have seen improving the lives and bodies of their followers as fundamental to their success.