The increasing frequency of mass shootings in the United States has become alarmingly common, prompting discussions about gun control. While gun control in the US involves complex legal issues, cultural factors---particularly ``gun culture''---play a significant but often overlooked role. Although the role of social media in shaping culture is well-documented, the intersection of gun culture and fringe online communities, like 4chan, remains unclear. This gap is particularly concerning given the rise in mass shootings and the online radicalization of some shooters. To address this gap, we explore gun culture on /k/, 4chan's weapons board. More specifically, we employ various NLP techniques to analyze over 4M posts on /k/ and contextualize the discussion within the broader body of theoretical framework of gun culture. Our findings reveal that discussions on /k/ cover a wide array of topics, with a significant focus on law-related discussions---over 17% of gun-related conversations on /k/ revolve around legal matters. Additionally, our analysis uncovers the presence of extreme viewpoints surrounding firearms, often manifesting as gun fetishism. These insights can be valuable for a range of stakeholders including social media platform, in efforts to address content moderation and de-radicalization

The news ecosystem encompasses a wide range of sources with varying levels of trustworthiness, and with public commentary giving different spins to the same stories. In this paper, we present a measurement pipeline able to identify news articles that discuss the same story and trace how they are shared on multiple online communities. We compile a list of 1,073 news websites and extract posts from four Web communities (Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and Gab) that contain URLs from these sources. This yields a dataset of 38M posts containing 15.6M unique news URLs, spanning almost three years. We study the data along several axes, assessing the trustworthiness of shared news stories, analyzing how they are discussed, and measuring the influence various Web communities have in that. Our analysis shows that different communities discuss different types of news, with polarized communities like Gab and /r/The_Donald subreddit disproportionately referencing untrustworthy sources. We also find t hat f ringe c ommunities o ften h ave a disproportionate influence o n o ther p latforms w .r.t. p ushing n arratives around certain news, for example, about political elections, immigration, or foreign policy. In fact, fringe communities are seemingly successful in influencing the discussion on false narratives about news events on mainstream social networks.