I've been on imageboards since 2009. Since then, I've seen a disturbing, consistent, and reoccurring phenomenon which involves board admins and CP distributors. CP spam has been a constant in imageboard history, but it's usually regarded as a natural consequence of running a public board with very little screening ability. That's what I thought when I first came across it on 4chan. I don't believe that anymore, at least not for most boards.
So, getting to the meat of it: most board admins and jannies actively facilitate the CP spam they get. They aren't just complacent, they are actually financially involved with the people posting it.
>board owners are in a conspiracy to get their own boards shut downNo for the board shutdown part, yes for the conspiracy part. I first saw this on /b/ back in 2010, where there was regular CP spam all revolving around the same ring of websites. The spam would be posted at exactly 2AM eastern time, and it wouldn't be removed until at least 8 hours later. Sometimes users would be courteous enough to let the CP threads drift down the pages until it was deleted, but most of the time they would end up getting bumped back to the first page over and over again.
4chan never shut down because of this kind of thing. In fact, very few imageboards have ever shut down because of CP. Obviously the ones made exclusively for it get yanked, but repeated and even hardcore CP spam on imageboards that are supposedly meant for other topics stays under the radar. I truly believed this was an unavoidable problem that the jannies were too slow to prevent all the time, but I didn't think much of it other than to bitch until the shit was removed. The thing is, the jannies were deliberately not doing their jobs.
The post that changed my mind on all of this was on 8chan's /b/ shortly after the site went up. The thread included IRC logs from people who were supposedly 4chan mods talking to another user about accepting payment for delaying action against CP spam. I would have disregarded this, but it actually included Bitcoin transaction hashes that showed the transfers on the same dates shown in the chatlogs. It implicated staff from several imageboards, including 4chan and 420chan, as well as several 8chan BOs. A lot of saged posters came out of the woodwork to call the post fake and gay. It gave off the stench of a cointelpro style campaign against it. Knowing 8chan's audienc...
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