Gun Culture in Fringe Social Media

TL;DR

The study analyzes gun culture on the fringe social media platform 4chan's /k/ board by processing over 4.4 million posts from 2022. It combines BERTopic-based high-level topic modeling, Louvain clustering, Top2Vec-based low-level topics, and manual annotation to map Gun Culture 1.0 and 2.0 themes, uncovering a dominance of self-defense, empowerment, and religious-patriotic narratives with signs of fetishism. Through Word2Vec and SBERT-driven semantic similarity, it characterizes attachments to guns across sentimental, social, gendered, and moral dimensions, revealing a nuanced spectrum from traditional topics to fetish-like language and confessions. The findings have implications for understanding online radicalization, informing content moderation and deradicalization efforts, and contributing a labeled dictionary of gun topics to support future fringe-media analyses.

Abstract

The increasing frequency of mass shootings in the United States has, unfortunately, become a norm. While the issue of gun control in the US involves complex legal concerns, there are also societal issues at play. One such social issue is so-called "gun culture," i.e., a general set of beliefs and actions related to gun ownership. However relatively little is known about gun culture, and even less is known when it comes to fringe online communities. This is especially worrying considering the aforementioned rise in mass shootings and numerous instances of shooters being radicalized online. To address this gap, we explore gun culture on /k/, 4chan's weapons board. More specifically, using a variety of quantitative techniques, we examine over 4M posts on /k/ and position their discussion within the larger body of theoretical understanding of gun culture. Among other things, our findings suggest that gun culture on /k/ covers a relatively diverse set of topics (with a particular focus on legal discussion), some of which are signals of fetishism.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Gun culture topic analysis pipeline.
• Figure 2: Number of threads and posts related to guns within each discussion labels. Labels directly aligned with Gun Culture 1.0 are highlighted in orange, those directly associated with Gun Culture 2.0 are green, and other labels are blue.
• Figure 3: Similarity between different types of gun attachment and discussion labels.
• Figure 4: Sentence transformer model training process.
• Figure 5: Histogram of average cosine similarity between collected quotes and posts labeled (a) Religious and (b) Law.