Maybe there exist an academic equivalent to blackhat PBNs, groups of academic self-referencing in loops to boost their citations. Number of citiations seems like an awful measure for academic contribution.
Why some people seem to relation this with war on drugs? If weed was legal, I wouldnt want people driving high as a kite either, if anything this legitimizes the use of marijuana by regulating it just as alcohol.
If we are worried about hateful propaganda the ratio is not really a relevant measure, the chans have a small user base compared to social networks, propaganda in Facebook could have a massive reach, thats a bigger risk than a fringe group in their own circlejerk, people are just irrationally attacking what they dont know about, for fear and/or pushing the agenda.
Again, 8chan is not one person, most users dont encourage this at all because it brings problems like exactly this one. Its the price of a truly free platform, sadly it seems americans hate freedom.
In the practical sense, I doubt this will counter shootings at all, intelligence services had them contained in a single board, now they will just spill around the internet.
This is a ridiculous witchhunt, 8chan is a platform for many different boards with different opinions, the media framing it as a right-wing white supremacist forum makes wonder if its ignorance or malice, /leftypol/ is probably as big as the /pol/ boogeyman, and thats just politics which is just a part of the rest of the boards.
No one is asking to close Facebook because Tarrant uploaded his shooting video there, why it would be any different in this case?