I haven’t been active on 4chan in well over a decade so I can’t speak to the state of it now. Do you know anything about “Project Chanology”? Around 2008 a whole lot of us “/b/tards” decided to take on the Church of Scientology, and even went outside and protested in front of their churches. Given the reputation of 4chan-ers as being deplorable neck-bearded basement-dwellers most people were shockingly well-adjusted normal people in person. I would describe it as normal people who found it entertaining to be as shocking as possible online, almost as a form of satire (and possibly against the rapid commercialisation of the internet, would be my guess based on my own experience), but were nothing like their online personas (in the majority of cases). But every once in a while you’d come across someone who didn’t quite pick up that it was satire, probably because they had pre-existing bigotries and were looking for like-minded people. (Think about how TheDonald started off as satire, but was quickly co-opted by people that took it seriously).
This particular screenshot reads like satire to me, but the problem is you don’t know for sure and odds are good that someone will take it seriously, co-opt the conversation, and turn it into something very serious. That’s part of why I starting avoiding 4chan, it used to be offensive memes for that sake of shocking like-minded people / friends, but it eventually became used as a propaganda or recruitment tool for people that weren’t “in on the joke” and to “test the waters”
TL;DR: Probably not, but (depressingly) you never know
I haven’t been active on 4chan in well over a decade so I can’t speak to the state of it now. Do you know anything about “Project Chanology”? Around 2008 a whole lot of us “/b/tards” decided to take on the Church of Scientology, and even went outside and protested in front of their churches. Given the reputation of 4chan-ers as being deplorable neck-bearded basement-dwellers most people were shockingly well-adjusted normal people in person. I would describe it as normal people who found it entertaining to be as shocking as possible online, almost as a form of satire (and possibly against the rapid commercialisation of the internet, would be my guess based on my own experience), but were nothing like their online personas (in the majority of cases). But every once in a while you’d come across someone who didn’t quite pick up that it was satire, probably because they had pre-existing bigotries and were looking for like-minded people. (Think about how TheDonald started off as satire, but was quickly co-opted by people that took it seriously).
This particular screenshot reads like satire to me, but the problem is you don’t know for sure and odds are good that someone will take it seriously, co-opt the conversation, and turn it into something very serious. That’s part of why I starting avoiding 4chan, it used to be offensive memes for that sake of shocking like-minded people / friends, but it eventually became used as a propaganda or recruitment tool for people that weren’t “in on the joke” and to “test the waters”
TL;DR: Probably not, but (depressingly) you never know