  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.
