Has anyone analysed JE's writing style and looked for matches in archived 4chan posts or content from similar platforms? Same with Ghislaine, there should be enough data to identify them atp right? I don't buy the MaxwellHill claims for various reasons but it doesn't mean there's nothing to find.
There was a post on here about a project in stylometry that analyzed HN users comment history. The tool helped find accounts that had an extremely similar writing style to a given account. The site was soon removed due to privacy concerns but many users with multiple account attested to its accuracy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
A while back the government claimed it had used stylometry to identify Satoshi Nakamoto.
>It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?
The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?
If you want to be grouped with foreigners who don't know English, it might work well, although word choices may still be distinctive enough to differentiate even when translated.
Assuming the source language is English, going to a romance language and back wouldn't be too hard grammar wise, but could easily wipe out a lot of non-Latin-descended words if you use the right approach to translation.
I remember using one of these tools and it falsely identified some other account as being mine. Of course, I only have just this account.
People always claimed this as a data leak vector but I've always been sceptical. Like just writing style and vocabulary is probably extremely shared among too many people to narrow it down much. (How people that you know could have written this reply?) The counter argument is that he had a very specific style in his mail so maybe this is a special case.
If you have a large enough set to test against and a specific person you are looking for, this is totally doable currently.
Of course it's doable. The question is how reliable the results are.
I wonder if it works on zoomers too. I have noticed a slight mode collapse among this population ;)
It just needs to find the needles in the haystack. Humans can better verify if they're truly needles.
Not just a test set, but enough of a set to search through and compare against. Several pages of in-depth writing isn't anywhere near sufficient, even when limiting the search space to ~10k people.
this is a well-studied field (stylometry). when combining writing styles, vocabulary, posting times, etc. you absolutely can narrow it down to specific people.
even when people deliberately try to feign some aspects (e.g. switching writing styles for different pseudonyms), they will almost always slip up and revert to their most comfortable style over time. which is great, because if they aren't also regularly changing pseudonyms (which are also subject to limited stylometry, so pseudonym creation should be somewhat randomized in name, location, etc.), you only need to catch them slipping once to get the whole history of that pseudonym (and potentially others, once that one is confirmed).
People do change over time, I used to write "ha" after every sentence for some reason
You know, i had a particularly cringy period in which i put "la" at the end of sentences.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. "Ooh, la" sounds really unnatural.
But on a serious note, what did "la" mean in your context? I've never seen this.
It’s a common thing for speakers of Singaporean English to end sentences with la/leh. But no idea if that’s what’s going on here.
In one use case, it is kind of a verbal exclamation point, but it has more meanings and uses than just that. Likely originates from Hokkien, but it has evolved into it is own thing. If you are curious, more details here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish
In Turkish la at the end disrespectfully refers to a male person.
You left off something.
sure, not denying that. my writing style is fairly different now in my 40s than it was in my late teens/early twenties.
but, those changes are usually pretty gradual and relatively small. thats why when attempting to identify someone via writing, you look at several aspects of the writing and not just word choice (grammar, use of specific slang, sentence length, paragraph structure, punctuation, etc.). it is highly unlikely that all aspects of someones writing changes at the same time. simply removing "ha" is inconsequential to identification if not much else changed.
additionally, this data is typically combined with other data/patterns (posting times, username (themes, length, etc.), writing that displays certain types of expertise, and more) to increase the confidence level of correct identification.
Stylometry is okay if you're trying to deanonymize a large enough sample text. A reddit account would be doable. But individual 4chan posts? You barely have enough content within the text limit.
The writing style is rather interesting. Epstein seems borderline dyslexic, but almost none of the emails I've seen are written in a coherent way, regardless of the sender.
Either people on that level rarely write anything on their own and have completely forgotten how to construct proper sentences or maybe that just how they communicate. Sort of language internal to the group.
I haven't looked at the files, nor followed the technical analysis much, but in case you missed it, some of that incoherency may be a processing glitch discussed a couple of days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868759
Yeah, I saw that and no, that's not what I mean. Some of the conversations reads like incoherent ramblings, completely devoid of context, answers that seems unrelated. Even when we have a "full" thread of conversation, it's really hard to parse the messages and make sense of them. It sometimes read like maybe they have their own language.
Some people postes conversations, and comments, but I don't feel like they actually grasp what's being discused and they just latches on to key words.
Stylometry is extremely sophisticated even with simple n-gram analysis. There's a demo of this that can easily pick out who you are on HN just based on a few paragraphs of your own writing, based on N-gram analysis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way. The approaches based on training another transformer to spot "AI generated" content are wrong.
> You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way.
I have no idea if specialized tools can reliably detect AI writing but, as someone whose writing on forums like HN has been accused a couple of times of being AI, I can say that humans aren't very good at it. So far, my limited experience with being falsely accused is it seems to partly just be a bias against being a decent writer with a good vocabulary who sometimes writes longer posts.
As for the reliability of specialized tools in detecting AI writing, I'm skeptical at a conceptual level because an LLM can be reinforcement trained with feedback from such a tool (RLTF instead of RLHF). While they may be somewhat reliable at the moment, it seems unlikely they'll stay that way.
Unfortunately, since there are already companies marketing 'AI detectors' to academic institutions, they won't stop marketing them as their reliability continues to get worse. Which will probably result in an increasing shit show of false accusations against students.
> I can say that humans aren't very good at it
You're assuming the people making accusations of posts being written by AI are from humans (which I agree are not good at making this determination). However, computers analyzing massive datasets are likely to be much better at it , and this can also be a Werewolf/Mafia/Killers-type situation where AI frequently accuses posters it believes are human, of being AI, to diminish the severity of accusations and blend in better.
Well, humans might be great at detecting AI (few false negatives) but might falsely accuse humans more often (higher false positive rate). You might be among a set of humans being falsely accused a lot, but that's just proof that "heuristic stylometry" is consistent, it doesn't really say anything about the size of that set.
Another possibility is that you are actually an AI and don't know it.
Hacker News is one of the best places for this, because people write relatively long posts and generally try to have novel ideas. On 4chan, most posts are very short memey quips, so everybody's style is closer to each others than it is to their normal writing style.
Funnily this also implies that laundering your writing through an AI is a good way to defeat stylometry. You add in a strong enough signal, and hopefully smooth out the rest.
Why are they wrong? Surely it depends on how you train it?
I'm pretty sure Epstein tried to meet with moot at least once: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=chris+poole
He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.
Few thoughts: in context it's not nuts at all:
- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.
- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.
Besides /new/ there was also /n/ (not at that time about transportation.) Moot's war with people being racist on 4chan had many back and forths before /pol/ was created.
Given the "nature" of 4chan (only a few hundred posts and a few thousand comments at a time, the vast majority of it shitposts and spam), it just can't do that. The imageboard format and limits basically prevent any scaling and mainstream success. If you follow any of the general threads in pol or sp for a while, you'll spot the same few people all the time, it's a tiny community of active users.
I think the logic is Pol didn't need to reach the masses, the masses only consume content they don't create it. You only need to radicalize the few people who then go on to be the 1% of people commenting and posting.
There's an old joke that 9gag* only reposts stuff from Reddit and Reddit only reposts stuff from 4chan and 4chan is the origin of all meme culture. This joke was widespread enough to reach myself and my friend group back in the day, even though none of used 4chan or Reddit.
If you radicalise the 0.01% of people who are prolific meme creators, you radicalise the masses.
* I did say old...
And Facebook repeats stuff from 9gag
I always wondered how much of a cultural etc influence 4Chan actually had (has?) - so much of the mindset and vernacular that was popular there 10+ years ago is now completely mainstream.
Ah, a rare opportunity to share a blog post that had a big effect on my political outlook back in 2016, Meme Magic Is Real, You Guys
Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf
https://medium.com/tryangle-magazine/meme-magic-is-real-you-... (dismissable login wall)
Counterpoint: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0
Summary: Trump used memes not in the sense of pepes but in the original (Dawkins') sense of "earworm" soundbites, along with a torrent of scandals, each making the previous seem like old news, to exploit a public tired of the "status quo" into voting for a zany wildcard pushing for reactionary policy
I remember in high school finding the whole nazi thing funny. They were literal losers in ww2. It was like drawing a communist hammer and sickle.
Looking back on it, I wonder if this was priming.
I didn't fall for it. They are still losers, but the encyclopedia dramatica with swastikas looks way way way less funny in 2026 than it did in 2008.
Internet trolls want attention. When the internet gives trolls attention and said that the trolls are culturally and politically important and dangerous it is exactly what was desired.
That many serious commentators didn't see this was itself very funny as anything with lots of attention on the internet does become influential! It is funny to a troll to see people pay serious attention to them "I am just a clown and they think I'm serious!". But don't think that they were actual comedians, lol, they are as serious as HN users.
In the dawkins sense of the word: the "meme" wants to spread and grow and the mechanism for it's virality was the immune response to it.
On another angle, the responses also gave the target an identity. Groups get defined as groups from outside more than from within. And it's always a wrong characterisation which also helps define the in group in relation. "You guys are all toxic Linux dude bros" inside: "but some of us love macs and windows, and some of us are girls, they sure dont understand our ways"
/pol/ in no way started the American culture war. It was brewing for a while.
pol was made to contain all posting on the American culture war so it could be banned from the other (more active) boards
You’re acting as if https://doge.gov does not exist. Ask yourself under which presidency, administration and kind of politics such is allowed to even exist with a straight face.
It would've existed regardless of internet memes, just under a different and similarly obnoxious name.
You actually think if we replayed society and magically shut off internet memes it would have played out the exact same but under a different name?
More or less, but it depends on what is classed as an internet meme.
Well, broke the levee if you will. Otherwise, explain Pepe.
I hardly think an internet image of a cartoon frog heavily influenced American elections, despite a surface-level co-option by various Republican politicians.
I agree completely.
I'm just saying, it's a symptom. The crazy found critical mass, broke containment. From there it was laundered in millions of Facebook groups and here we are.
In no way?
Just to substantiate this a bit: I remember a gleeful consensus in certain circles being that /pol/ and /r/the_donald had "memed Trump into the White House". It's much more complicated than that, but there's certainly an element of truth there.
https://www.wired.com/story/dale-beran-it-came-from-somethin...
This is a good book about it.
Then Reddit and almost all of social media went on to purge trump and pro trump content. The Donald was banned. Trump deplatformed across social media.
That's true, but not really relevant to this discussion. You can't really deplatform a president; yes he was no longer on Twitter, but roughly 8 billion people listen any time he speaks.
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2015 - 2016 reddit was exploited to hell by the_donald and other associated reddits. Things like coordinated up voting of a pinned post to get it to shoot up the front page, private chats to manipulate voting in a page.
There would be times when you would go to the r/all and half the page would be posts from them.
Not to mention a lot of the organized harassment a lot of the mods/power users of that sub caused in the years after. It was a mess.
Hey quick question, around January 2021, what would happened that caused Trump to be deplatformed? Anything stick out in your mind?
As I see it, Trump was a symptom of something older.. no matter what effort were made to slow / avoid the issues, the mania was still growing.
That subreddit was banned far too late. They had been urging for violence and hatred for quite some time. But action was taken only after the clowns inside of it were declaring they'd murder police officers executing a warrant (regarding legislators staying home to block quorum or whatever it was).
Of course in 2026 it is apparently fine to break into homes without a warrant and execute protesters. The same people are able to "believe" two literally opposite concepts.
I don’t agree with this analysis.
The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.
And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.
From moot's perspective, it can be as simple as being convinced by some rich guy you've never heard of to bring back the politics board. He doesn't need to have an intent to start a fascist coup, that's Epstein's job. GamerGate is just the point at which moot realized he'd fucked up and destroyed 4chan imageboard culture by letting /pol/ fester.
Which meeting are you seeing? That search doesn't seem to work for me, I'm only seeing the one Jan 2012.
It doesn't show up in JMail for some reason, but it's this email: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01852...
Thanks, trying to figure out the timeline relative to the board's creation given how close they are. The first email I can find related to a meeting is this one from Boris Nikolic on Oct 20th, with /pol/ on the 23rd.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01992...
be gentile
We're just not going to talk about that one I suppose?
'Sensitive' in this context can mean antisemitic. At least that's how I've heard this joke used.
Must be russian or qatari humour <|:o)
What is the theory here ? that Epstein suggested the idea of breeding extreme counter culture on 4chan ?
That is a crazy amount of emails from/about moot...
Created /pol/ for epstein himself https://bsky.app/profile/kaiserbeamz.bsky.social/post/3mdou7...