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This story below adds some much needed context about the many people that have showed up on this site pushing and “liking” idiotic conspiracies about the Parkland students because they felt that the students’ message is resonating with people...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wa...a856be-1b20-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html

Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.”

The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.

A Washington Post review of thousands of posts on sites such as 8chan, 4chan and Reddit showed how people on online forums worked aggressively to undermine news reports about a troubled teen accused of killing 17 people, most of them students.

There was little sign on the chat boards of any unease about singling out Parkland survivors and their families for personal attacks. Instead the mood seemed jubilant, with posters celebrating that the campaign had reached a broader audience of “normies,” meaning people who typically keep their distance from racist, anti-Semitic and far-right extremist conversation.

“Just wanted to say thanks for all your digging and research,” one poster wrote on 8chan. “Extra thanks if you’re spreading info or memes about this kid. It’s already breaking through the normie-sphere. KEEP PUSHING!”

Anonymous online forums have long incubated politically extreme, racially charged conversation with few rules or concessions to good taste. On 4chan, founded in 2003 and now owned by a Japanese businessman, such chats typically happen on the /pol/ — for “politically incorrect” — message board. 8chan, founded in 2013 by those who considered 4chan too restrictive, also has its own /pol/ board, where the exchanges play out under the heading, “On the jews and Their Lies.”
Reddit is typically regarded as more mainstream, but the individual message boards, including “r/The_Donald” and “r/conspiracy,” hosted harsh attacks on the Parkland students. The site in 2016 closed its thriving “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory message board, a leading source of allegations that a child molestation ring run by Democratic Party luminaries operated out of a Washington pizza shop that led to a real shooting in which no one was hurt. Reddit declined to comment.

By Feb. 16, two days after the shooting, the hunt for information was intensifying. “This Dave Hoggs keeps showing up on TV,” said one poster on Reddit that day. “There’s something wrong with this guy. He needs to be investigated. WE NEED TO DIG!”

Memes with Hogg’s face tagged as “Son of FBI agent” were spreading widely on Twitter by the next day. And on Feb. 18, users were cheering the surprising speed with which they were able to shape the story line.

“Man, I just gotta say, on our progress around these events is quite remarkable,” one 8chan poster wrote that day. It’s “marvelous to see non centralized actors . . . produce so many counter points, so fast, with zero centrally planned coordination.”

The poster added, “At this point I think we managed to get into a 1.5 . . . to 2 :1 ratio of information warfare for OUR advantage, compared to the jews.”

The claims about Hogg also spread to conservative websites such as Gateway Pundit (headlined “EXPOSED”), the social network Gab.ai (“spread it everywhere, this is the proof”) and Reddit forums like “r/The_Donald.” One post there, a photo of Hogg, carried a caption suggesting he was smiling because he saw his “fellow students get murdered but [he] got famous from it.” Users of the site registered their approval more than 3,800 times.

That same conspiracy was pushed and liked by dozens of new members here over the past week, in part as illustrated in this thread (some of these same posters have since deleted the 8chans pictures they posted once the “kek” flags and other anti Semitic symbols in them were pointed out but the posts, absent these pics, are otherwise the same) https://www.neogaf.com/threads/the-speech-that-sparked-a-revolution.1461151/

My view has always been that people should be free to express extreme views and people should be free to and vigilant in challenging them and calling out bullshit when these views are expressed.

Wapo’s extensive research on this in the article above lends some much needed context about where these views are coming from so that the posters that care about neogaf can better challenge them when these views show up. If we fail to, this site will descend into one full of bigoted posts that go unchallenged and normal people will leave the site in droves.

 

[EviLore]

So the "new members" pushing this narrative on NeoGAF are coming straight from 8chan's Fake News Dissemination Task Force? That's pretty sensationalist in its own right.

Thanks for the feedback. We'll be on the lookout for the barbarian invaders as always.