4chan
Encyclopedia
4chan is an English-language
imageboard
website
. Launched on October 1, 2003, its boards were originally used for the posting of pictures and discussion of manga
and anime
. Users generally post anonymously and the site has been linked to Internet subculture
s and activism
, most notably Project Chanology
.
4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet meme
s such as lolcat
s, Rickrolling
, "Chocolate Rain
", Pedobear
, and many others. The site's "Random" board is by far its most popular and notorious feature. Known as "/b/", there are very minimal rules on posted content. Gawker once jokingly claimed that "reading /b/ will melt your brain".
The site's Anonymous
community and culture have often provoked media attention. For media planners, this enterprise is "further proof that creativity is everywhere and new media
is less accessible" to advertisement agencies
. Journalists looked at how an Internet destination was hijacked for a prank, so that images of Rick Astley
appeared instead of the page that was searched for; the coordination of attacks against other websites and Internet users; and covered the reaction to threats of violence that have been posted on the site. The Guardian
once summarized the 4chan community as "lunatic, juvenile... brilliant, ridiculous and alarming."
forums
. He intended 4chan to be a place to discuss Japanese comic
s and anime
, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel
("2chan") imageboard. Poole originally used the Futaba Channel to obtain anime-related images, and liked the concept of a message board where people anonymously shared images, which eventually led to his idea of creating a similar English-based website. During the creation of 4chan, he obtained the source code for the Futaba Channel website, and translated the Japanese text into English using Altavista's Babelfish online translator. When he first created the website, it had only two boards: "/a/ - Anime/General" and "/b/ - Anime/Random"; over time more boards were created, and /b/ was eventually renamed to simply "/b/ - Random".
The activity of 4chan takes place on message board
s and imageboard
s. The website is split into six categories: Japanese culture
, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). These provide for on-topic boards to discuss anime
, manga
, technology
, sport
, photography
, music
, hentai
, torrents, travel
, physical fitness
, as well as a random board. 4chan originally hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called "world4ch", but these were later moved to the dis.4chan.org subdomain. The site has had at least one employee, a programmer
whom Poole met via online Tetris
. All other moderators
are volunteers. The boards that attract the largest amount of traffic, from greatest to least, are /b/ (Random), /v/ (Video games), /a/ (Anime and Manga), and /s/ (board intended for sharing explicit images).
During the early days of 4chan, the boards that originally existed were the anime, random, cute, hentai, and yaoi
boards; a lolicon
board also existed at /l/, but was removed less than one month after its creation. The /g/ board also was initially dedicated to guro, before it was deleted and later remade as the "technology" board.
During 2004, 4chan briefly went offline, although the site returned fully online a few months later. Following 4chan's return, non-anime related boards, such as the weapons, automobile, and video games boards, were introduced. In 2008, the "Japan/General" board at /jp/ was created for topics that did not fit under the anime and manga category of /a/; /jp/ was later renamed to "Otaku Culture".
4chan is one of the Internet's most trafficked imageboards, according to the Los Angeles Times
. 4chan's Alexa
rank is generally around 700, though it has been as high as number 56 at times. It is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth
; as a result, its financing has often been problematic. Poole acknowledges that donations alone cannot keep the site online, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet. However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content. In January 2009, Poole signed a new deal with an advertising company; , he was $20,000 in debt and the site was continuing to lose money.
Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously
. Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as "Anonymous" or "moot". In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcode
s as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity. As making a post without filling in the "Name" field causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users. Moderators generally post without a name even when performing sysop
actions. A "capcode" may be used to attribute the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", although moderators often post without the capcode. In a 2011 interview on Nico Nico Douga
, Poole explained that there are approximately 20 volunteer moderators active on 4chan. 4chan also has a junior moderation team, called "janitors", who may delete posts or images and suggest that the normal moderation team ban a user, but who can not post with a capcode. Revealing oneself as a janitor is grounds for immediate dismissal.
In January 2011, Poole announced the deletion of the /r9k/ ("ROBOT9000") and /new/ (News) boards, saying that /new/ had become devoted to racist discussions, and /r9k/ no longer served its original purpose of being a test implementation of xkcd
's ROBOT9000 script. During the same year, the /soc/ board was created in an effort to reduce the number of socialization threads on /b/.
/r9k/ was restored on 23 October 2011, along with /hc/ ("Hardcore", previously deleted), /pol/ (a rebranding of /new/) and the new /diy/ board, in addition to an apology by Poole where he recalls how he criticized the deletion of Encyclopedia Dramatica
, and realized that he had done the same.
4chan has been the target of occasional denial of service attacks
. For instance, on December 28, 2010, 4chan went down due to a such an attack. Christopher Poole said on his blog "We now join the ranks of MasterCard
, Visa, PayPal
, et al.—an exclusive club!"
. Before that time he had used the alias "moot". The same day, Lev Grossman
of Time
published an interview describing Poole's influence as a non-visible administrator as "one of the most [significant]" on the evolution of content collaboration. Although Grossman's article began with the confession that "I don't even know his real name", he claimed to identify moot as Christopher Poole. Later, on July 10, Grossman admitted that there was an outside chance that Christopher Poole was not moot's real name, rather an obscure reference to a 4chan inside joke. The Washington Post concurred that "Christopher Poole" could be "all a big hoax, a 'gotcha.' It would be just what you'd expect from the creator of 4chan." In March 2009, Time backpedaled somewhat on the issue by placing the moot persona on the 2009 Time 100
finalists list.
Prior to the Wall Street Journal and Time interviews, Poole deliberately kept his real identity separate from 4chan. He told Grossman "my personal private life is very separate from my Internet life ... There's a firewall in between." As moot, he has spoken at conferences at Yale University
and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
. A 2008 article in The Observer
had him down as "the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of", though he has since been described in more limited terms such as "benefactor".
In February 2009, The Washington Post reported that Poole had attended Virginia Commonwealth University
for a few semesters before dropping out. It reported that Christopher Poole was living with his mother while looking for a way to make money from owning 4chan.
In April 2009, Poole was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine. The results were questioned even before the poll completed, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing
were used to influence the vote. 4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely, when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME
."
On September 12, 2009, Poole gave a talk on why 4chan has a reputation as a "Meme Factory" at the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna, Austria, which was part of the Paraflows 09 festival, themed Urban Hacking. In this talk, Poole mainly attributed this to the anonymous system, and to the lack of data retention on the site ("The site has no memory.").
On February 10, 2010, Poole spoke at the TED2010 conference
in Long Beach, California
. He spoke about the increasing prevalence of persistent user identities and the sharing of personal information on sites like Facebook
and Twitter
and he also spoke about the value of anonymous posting on sites like 4chan. Fred Leal of the Brazilian newspaper Estadão
said his inclusion in the conference "indicates that something extraordinary is happening... [4chan] challenges every Internet convention: it is, alone, the antithesis of Google, social networking sites, and blogs."
In 2010, Poole was reported to have raised $625,000 to create a new online enterprise, called "Canvas
". The website opened on January 31, 2011, and features digitally modified images uploaded by users who are required to self-identify using Facebook Connect.
In April 2010, Poole gave evidence in the trial United States of America v. David Kernell
as a government witness. As a witness, he explained the terminology used on 4chan to the prosecutor, ranging from "OP" to "lurker". He also explained to the court the nature of the data given to the FBI as part of the search warrant, including how users can be uniquely identified from site audit logs.
In a 2010 interview, Poole discussed his belief in the value of multiple identities, including anonymity, in contrast to the merge of online and real-world identities occurring on Facebook
and many other social networking sites.
, due to the norm of posts signed with the "Anonymous" moniker. The National Post
s David George-Cosh said it has been "widely reported" that Anonymous is associated with 4chan and 711chan
, as well as numerous Internet Relay Chat
(IRC) channels.
Through its association with Anonymous, 4chan has become associated with Project Chanology
, a worldwide protest against the Church of Scientology
held by members of Anonymous. On January 15, 2008, a 4chan user posted to /b/, suggesting participants "do something big" against the Church of Scientology's website. This message resulted in the Church receiving threatening phone calls. It quickly grew into a large real-world protest. Unlike previous Anonymous attacks, this action was characterized by 4chan meme
s including rickroll
s and Guy Fawkes mask
s. The raid drew criticism from some 4chan users who felt it would bring the site undesirable attention.
's Nick Douglas summarized /b/ as a board where "people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other." /b/ has a "no rules" policy, except for bans on certain illegal content, such as child pornography
, invasions of other websites (posting floods of disruptive content), and under-18 viewing, all of which are inherited from site-wide rules. The "no invasions" rule was added in late 2006, after /b/ users spent most of the summer "invading" Habbo Hotel
. The "no rules" policy also applies to actions of administrators and moderators, which means that users may be banned at any time, for any reason, including no reason at all. Due partially to its anonymous nature, board moderation is not always successful—indeed, the site's anti-child pornography rule is a subject of jokes on /b/. Christopher Poole told The New York Times
, in a discussion on the moderation of /b/, that "the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards" and that site staff simply provided a framework.
The humor of /b/'s many users, who refer to themselves as "/b/tards", is often incomprehensible to newcomers and outsiders, and is characterized by intricate inside joke
s and black comedy
. Users often refer to each other, and much of the outside world, as fags. They are often referred to by outsiders as trolls
, who regularly act with the intention of "doing it for the lulz": a corruption of "LOL
" used to denote amusement at another's expense
. The New York Observer has described posters as "immature pranksters whose bad behavior is encouraged by the site's total anonymity and the absence of an archive". Douglas said of the board, "reading /b/ will melt your brain", and cited Encyclopedia Dramatica
's definition of /b/ as "the asshole of the Internets
". Mattathias Schwartz of The New York Times likened /b/ to "a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line
", while Baltimore City Paper
wrote that "in the high school of the Internet, /b/ is the kid with a collection of butterfly knives
and a locker full of porn." Wired
describes /b/ as "notorious".
Each post is assigned a post number. Certain post numbers are sought after with a large amount of posting taking place to "GET" them. A "GET" occurs when a post's number ends in a special number, such as 12345678, 22222222, or every millionth post. A sign of 4chan's scaling, according to Poole, was when GETs lost meaning due to the high post rate resulting in a GET occurring every few weeks. He estimated /b/'s post rate in July 2008 to be 150,000–200,000 posts per day.
s are catchphrases or images that spread quickly, peer to peer
, across the Internet. Many Internet memes have originated on 4chan, usually /b/, as its fast moving, crowd psychology
nature enables content to quickly be passed on to large numbers of viewers.
Other memes originating on the site have gained media attention of a lesser degree. These include "So I herd u liek mudkip
z", which involves a phrase based on Pokémon
, and which generated numerous YouTube tribute videos. 4chan, and other websites, such as the satirical Encyclopedia Dramatica, have also contributed to the development of significant amounts of leet
speak.
of a cat
with text intended to contribute humour
. The text is often idiosyncratic
and grammatically incorrect. In 2005, the meme was widely popularized by 4chan in the form of "Caturday". Every Saturday, users posted pictures of cats with image macro
s relating to that day's theme.
to change "egg" to "duck" across 4chan. Thus, words such as "eggroll" were changed to "duckroll". This led to a bait-and-switch in which external links disguised as relevant to a discussion instead led to a picture of a duck on wheels.
In March 2007, the trailer
for the video game Grand Theft Auto IV
was released. Its immense popularity caused publisher Rockstar Games
' website to crash
. An unidentified 4chan user applied the concept of the duckroll to what appeared to be a link to the trailer on YouTube
, but instead showed the music video for Rick Astley
's 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up
". Thus, the "rickroll" was born. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times
, Astley said he found the meme "bizarre and funny".
's song "Chocolate Rain" was posted on /b/ on July 11, 2007. The Age
reported that 4chan posters urged each other to "swarm" the video on YouTube and thus increase its ranking. The video became an immensely popular Internet meme, resulting in cover versions by John Mayer
and Green Day
drummer Tré Cool
. The portion of the song in which Zonday turns away from the microphone, with a caption stating "I move away from the mic to breathe in", became an oft-repeated meme on 4chan and inspired remixes.
in an article on the games in Gazeta Olsztyńska
, a Polish newspaper. This was done accidentally, due to the image being used from Google Images, the authors were unaware of the joke. Similarly, the Dutch television guide Avrobode used one of the images. It has been used as a symbol of pedophilia by Maltese
graffiti vandals prior to a papal visit.
, 2001: A Space Odyssey
, and Diamond Dogs
. This reaction soon spread to the general forum, /b/, where elements of the show quickly caught on as recurring jokes, and spread as memes to other forums around the Internet. Though many of the fan-created elements of the show use copyrighted footage of the show and combine them with mature themed elements such as from R-rated films such as Inglourious Basterds or foul language from artists such as Wu-Tang Clan
, Hasbro has not taken a stance against these videos and has allowed them to continue to be hosted at various outlets, recognizing that the parodies and remixes form a "participatory culture" that has helped to draw larger attention to the show.
Users of 4chan and other websites "raided" Hal Turner
by launching DDoS attacks and prank call
ing his phone-in radio show during December 2006 and January 2007. The attacks caused Turner's website to go offline. This cost thousands of dollars of bandwidth bills according to Turner. In response, Turner sue
d 4chan, 7chan, and other websites; however, he lost his plea for an injunction
and failed to receive letters from the court.
KTTV
Fox 11 aired a report on Anonymous
, calling them a group of "hackers on steroids", "domestic terrorists", and collectively an "Internet hate machine" on July 26, 2007. Slashdot
founder Rob Malda
posted a comment made by another Slashdot user, Miang, stating that the story focused mainly on users of "4chan, 7chan and 420chan". Miang claimed that the report "seems to confuse /b/ raids and motivational poster
templates with a genuine threat to the American public", arguing that the "unrelated" footage of a van exploding shown in the report was to "equate anonymous posting with domestic terror".
On July 10, 2008, the swastika
CJK unicode character
(卐) appeared at the top of Google
's Hot Trends
list—a tally of the most popular search terms in the United States—for several hours. It was later reported that the HTML
numeric character reference
for the symbol had been posted on /b/, with a request to perform a Google search
for the string. A multitude of /b/ visitors followed the order and pushed the symbol to the top of the chart, though Google later removed the result.
Later that year, the private Yahoo! Mail
account of Sarah Palin
, Republican
vice presidential
candidate in the 2008 United States presidential election
, was hacked
by a 4chan user. This followed criticism of Palin and other politicians supposedly using private email accounts for governmental work. The hacker posted the account's password on /b/, and screenshot
s from within the account to Wikileaks
. A /b/ user then logged in and changed the password, posting a screenshot of his sending an email to a friend of Palin's informing her of the new password on the /b/ thread. However, he forgot to blank out the password in the screenshot. A multitude of /b/ users attempted to log in with the new password, and the account was automatically locked out by Yahoo!. The incident was criticized by some /b/ users, in that most reports on the hack focused on 4chan, rather than Palin's violation of campaign law. One user commented, "seriously, /b/. We could have changed history and failed, epically." The FBI
and Secret Service
began investigating the incident shortly after its occurrence. On September 20 it was revealed they were questioning David Kernell, the son of Democratic
Tennessee State Representative
Mike Kernell
.
The stock price of Apple Inc. fell significantly in October 2008 after a hoax story was submitted to CNN
's user-generated news site iReport.com
claiming that company CEO Steve Jobs
had suffered a major heart attack
. The source of the story was traced back to 4chan.
In May 2009, members of the site attacked YouTube, posting pornographic
videos on the site. A 4chan member acknowledged being part of the attack, telling the BBC
that it was in response to YouTube "deleting music". In January 2010, members of the site attacked YouTube again in response to the suspension of YouTube user lukeywes1234 for failing to meet the minimum age requirement of thirteen. The videos uploaded by the user had apparently become popular with 4chan members, who subsequently became angered after the account was suspended and called for a new wave of pornographic videos to be uploaded to YouTube on January 6, 2010. Later the same year, 4chan made numerous disruptive pranks directed at singer Justin Bieber
.
In September 2010, in retaliation against the Motion Picture Association of America
and the Recording Industry Association of America
hiring of Aiplex Software
to launch cyberattacks against The Pirate Bay
, Anonymous members, recruited through posts on 4chan boards, subsequently initiated their own attacks, dubbed Operation Payback
, DDoS'ing the website of all three companies. The targeted websites usually went offline for a short period of time due to the attacks, before recovering.
A number of law firms associated with the anti-piracy industry were also affected, most notably the UK law firm ACS:Law
, who had their web host account suspended multiple times due to the excessive traffic caused by the attacks. In retaliation for the initial attacks being called only a minor nuisance, Anonymous launched more attacks, bringing the site down yet again. After coming back up, the front page accidentally revealed a backup file of the entire website, which contained over 300 megabytes of private company emails, which were leaked to several torrents and across several sites on the Internet.
It has been suggested that the data leak could cost the law firm up to £500,000 in fines for breaching British Data Protection Laws.
in January 2011, BBC News reported that the law firm have announced they are to stop "chasing illegal file-sharers". Head of the ACS:Law Andrew Crossley in a statement to a court addressed issues which influenced the decision to back down "I have ceased my work...I have been subject to criminal attack. My e-mails have been hacked. I have had death threats and bomb threats."
warned National Football League
officials in Miami, New York City, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Oakland, and Cleveland about a possible threat involving the simultaneous use of dirty bomb
s at stadiums. The threat claimed that the attack would be carried out on October 22, the final day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan
. Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security expressed doubt concerning the credibility of the threats, but warned the relevant organizations as a precaution. The games proceeded as planned but under a higher level of security awareness. The threats came to light in the national media after Jake Brahm admitted to having posted the threats on 4chan and repeating them on other websites approximately 40 times. Brahm did not expect the message to be taken seriously since he "would never take anything posted on 4chan as fact"; an FBI
official was quoted as saying the "credibility of [the threat] was beyond ridiculous". As a parody of the incident, 4chan temporarily added "Don't mess with football" as an additional rule for /b/.
On October 20, 2006, Brahm turned himself in to federal authorities, and was charged with fabricating a fake terrorist threat and taken into custody. On February 28, 2008, he pled guilty to the federal charges. On June 5, 2008, he was sentenced to six months in prison, six months' house arrest, and ordered to pay $26,750 in restitution
.
Around midnight on September 11, 2007, a student posted photographs of mock pipe bomb
s and another photograph of him holding them while saying he would blow up his high school—Pflugerville High School in Pflugerville
, Texas
—at 9:11 a.m. on September 11. Users of 4chan helped to track him down by finding the perpetrator's father's name in the Exif
data of a photograph he took, and contacted the police. He was arrested before school began that day. The incident turned out to be a hoax; the "weapons" were toys and there were no actual bombs.
Jarrad Willis, a 20-year-old from Melbourne
, Australia
was arrested on December 8, 2007, after apparently posting on 4chan that he was "going to shoot and kill as many people as I can until which time I am incapacitated or killed by the police". The post, accompanied by an image of another man holding a shotgun, threatened a shopping mall near Beverly Hills
. While the investigation was still open, Willis was charged with criminal defamation for a separate incident but died before the case was heard.
On February 4, 2009, a posting on the 4chan /b/ said there would be a school shooting at St Eskils Gymnasium in Eskilstuna
, Sweden. 1250 students and 50 teachers were evacuated. A 21-year-old man was arrested after 4chan had provided the police with the IP address
of the poster. According to the police the suspect said it was a joke and he was released after they found no indication that the threat was serious.
. The 4chan community was able to track down the originator of the videos, a fourteen-year-old from Lawton, Oklahoma
, and passed his details to his local police department. As a result of this, a suspect was arrested and the cat was treated by a veterinarian and taken to a safe place.
's DSL branch temporarily blocked access to the img.4chan.org domain (host of /b/ and /r9k/), which was initially believed to be an attempt at Internet censorship
, and met with hostility on 4chan's part.
On July 27, 2009, AT&T issued a statement claiming that the block was put in place after an AT&T customer was affected by a denial-of-service attack originating from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org, and was an attempt to "prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and... our other customers." AT&T maintains that the block was not related to the content on 4chan.
4chan's founder Christopher Poole responded with the following:
Major news outlets have reported that the issue may be related to DDoSing of 4chan and that the suspicions of 4chan users fell on the person who owned Swedish-based Anontalk.com at that time for doing this.
Concerning the AT&T claims of DDoS attacks originating from 4chan, Poole confirmed it was due to a network error:
customers that they were having difficulties accessing the site's image boards. After investigating, Poole found out that only traffic on port
80 to the boards.4chan.org domain was affected, leading members to believe that the block was intentional.
On February 7, 2010, Verizon Wireless confirmed that 4chan was "explicitly blocked". The block was lifted several days later.
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
imageboard
Imageboard
An imageboard or image board is a type of Internet forum that revolves around the posting of images. The first imageboards were created in Japan, and many English-language imageboards today are centered around Japanese culture...
website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
. Launched on October 1, 2003, its boards were originally used for the posting of pictures and discussion of manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
and anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
. Users generally post anonymously and the site has been linked to Internet subculture
Subculture
In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...
s and activism
Activism
Activism consists of intentional efforts to bring about social, political, economic, or environmental change. Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing...
, most notably Project Chanology
Project Chanology
Project Chanology is a protest movement against the practices of the Church of Scientology by members of Anonymous, a leaderless Internet-based group that defines itself as ubiquitous...
.
4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet meme
Internet meme
The term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...
s such as lolcat
Lolcat
A lolcat is an image combining a photograph of a cat with text intended to contribute humour. The text is often idiosyncratic and grammatically incorrect, and its use in this way is known as "lolspeak" or "kitty pidgin"....
s, Rickrolling
Rickrolling
Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch; a person provides a hyperlink seemingly relevant to the topic at hand, but actually leads to Astley's video...
, "Chocolate Rain
Chocolate Rain
"Chocolate Rain" is a song and music video performed by American Internet personality Tay Zonday. After being posted on YouTube on April 22, 2007, the song quickly became popular. , the video has over 74,000,000 views. The music video portrays a bespectacled Zonday in a recording studio wearing a...
", Pedobear
Pedobear
Pedobear is an Internet meme that became popular through the imageboard 4chan. As the name suggests , it is portrayed as a pedophilic bear, and is used to mock pedophiles...
, and many others. The site's "Random" board is by far its most popular and notorious feature. Known as "/b/", there are very minimal rules on posted content. Gawker once jokingly claimed that "reading /b/ will melt your brain".
The site's Anonymous
Anonymous (group)
Anonymous is an international hacking group, spread through the Internet, initiating active civil disobedience, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Originating in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, the term refers to the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic,...
community and culture have often provoked media attention. For media planners, this enterprise is "further proof that creativity is everywhere and new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
is less accessible" to advertisement agencies
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
. Journalists looked at how an Internet destination was hijacked for a prank, so that images of Rick Astley
Rick Astley
Richard Paul "Rick" Astley is an English singer-songwriter, musician, and radio personality. He is known for his 1987 song, "Never Gonna Give You Up", which was a #1 hit single in 25 countries...
appeared instead of the page that was searched for; the coordination of attacks against other websites and Internet users; and covered the reaction to threats of violence that have been posted on the site. The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
once summarized the 4chan community as "lunatic, juvenile... brilliant, ridiculous and alarming."
Background
4chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of a then-15-year-old student from New York City named Christopher Poole, who posts as "moot". Prior to starting 4chan, Poole had been a regular participant on the Something AwfulSomething Awful
Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a variety of content, including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as it grew, so...
forums
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
. He intended 4chan to be a place to discuss Japanese comic
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
s and anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel
Futaba Channel
, or Futaba for short, is an internet forum in Japan. It is a popular Japanese imageboard dealing in otaku and underground culture.-Origin:Futaba Channel was set up on August 30, 2001, as a refuge for 2channel users when 2channel was in danger of shutting down...
("2chan") imageboard. Poole originally used the Futaba Channel to obtain anime-related images, and liked the concept of a message board where people anonymously shared images, which eventually led to his idea of creating a similar English-based website. During the creation of 4chan, he obtained the source code for the Futaba Channel website, and translated the Japanese text into English using Altavista's Babelfish online translator. When he first created the website, it had only two boards: "/a/ - Anime/General" and "/b/ - Anime/Random"; over time more boards were created, and /b/ was eventually renamed to simply "/b/ - Random".
The activity of 4chan takes place on message board
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
s and imageboard
Imageboard
An imageboard or image board is a type of Internet forum that revolves around the posting of images. The first imageboards were created in Japan, and many English-language imageboards today are centered around Japanese culture...
s. The website is split into six categories: Japanese culture
Culture of Japan
The culture of Japan has evolved greatly over the millennia, from the country's prehistoric Jōmon period to its contemporary hybrid culture, which combines influences from Asia, Europe and North America...
, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). These provide for on-topic boards to discuss anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
, manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
, technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
, sport
Sport
A Sport is all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical fitness and provide entertainment to participants. Sport may be competitive, where a winner or winners can be identified by objective means, and may require a degree...
, photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
, music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, hentai
Hentai
is a Japanese word that, in the West, is used when referring to sexually explicit or pornographic comics and animation, particularly those of Japanese origin such as anime, manga, and computer games. The word hentai is a kanji compound of 変 and 態...
, torrents, travel
Travel
Travel is the movement of people or objects between relatively distant geographical locations. 'Travel' can also include relatively short stays between successive movements.-Etymology:...
, physical fitness
Physical fitness
Physical fitness comprises two related concepts: general fitness , and specific fitness...
, as well as a random board. 4chan originally hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called "world4ch", but these were later moved to the dis.4chan.org subdomain. The site has had at least one employee, a programmer
Programmer
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...
whom Poole met via online Tetris
Tetris
Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...
. All other moderators
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
are volunteers. The boards that attract the largest amount of traffic, from greatest to least, are /b/ (Random), /v/ (Video games), /a/ (Anime and Manga), and /s/ (board intended for sharing explicit images).
During the early days of 4chan, the boards that originally existed were the anime, random, cute, hentai, and yaoi
Yaoi
In careful Japanese enunciation, all three vowels are pronounced separately, for a three-mora word, . The English equivalent is . also known as Boys' Love, is a Japanese popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by...
boards; a lolicon
Lolicon
, also romanised as lolikon or rorikon, is a Japanese portmanteau of the phrase "Lolita complex". In Japan, the term describes an attraction to underage girls or an individual with such an attraction...
board also existed at /l/, but was removed less than one month after its creation. The /g/ board also was initially dedicated to guro, before it was deleted and later remade as the "technology" board.
During 2004, 4chan briefly went offline, although the site returned fully online a few months later. Following 4chan's return, non-anime related boards, such as the weapons, automobile, and video games boards, were introduced. In 2008, the "Japan/General" board at /jp/ was created for topics that did not fit under the anime and manga category of /a/; /jp/ was later renamed to "Otaku Culture".
4chan is one of the Internet's most trafficked imageboards, according to the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
. 4chan's Alexa
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...
rank is generally around 700, though it has been as high as number 56 at times. It is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
; as a result, its financing has often been problematic. Poole acknowledges that donations alone cannot keep the site online, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet. However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content. In January 2009, Poole signed a new deal with an advertising company; , he was $20,000 in debt and the site was continuing to lose money.
Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously
Anonymity
Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymity typically refers to the state of an individual's personal identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown.There are many reasons why a...
. Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as "Anonymous" or "moot". In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcode
Tripcode
A tripcode is a means of telecommunication authentication that does not require registration. Tripcodes are most often used in 2channel-style message boards or Futaba Channel-style imageboards...
s as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity. As making a post without filling in the "Name" field causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users. Moderators generally post without a name even when performing sysop
SysOp
A sysop is an administrator of a multi-user computer system, such as a bulletin board system or an online service virtual community. It may also be used to refer to administrators of other Internet-based network services....
actions. A "capcode" may be used to attribute the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", although moderators often post without the capcode. In a 2011 interview on Nico Nico Douga
Nico Nico Douga
is a popular video sharing website in Japan managed by Niwango, a subsidiary of Dwango. Its nickname is "Niconico" or "Nico-dō", where "nikoniko" is the Japanese ideophone for smiling. Nico Nico Douga is the thirteenth most visited website in Japan...
, Poole explained that there are approximately 20 volunteer moderators active on 4chan. 4chan also has a junior moderation team, called "janitors", who may delete posts or images and suggest that the normal moderation team ban a user, but who can not post with a capcode. Revealing oneself as a janitor is grounds for immediate dismissal.
In January 2011, Poole announced the deletion of the /r9k/ ("ROBOT9000") and /new/ (News) boards, saying that /new/ had become devoted to racist discussions, and /r9k/ no longer served its original purpose of being a test implementation of xkcd
Xkcd
xkcd is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe. The comic's tagline describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." It has been recognized in such mainstream media as The Guardian and The New York Times....
's ROBOT9000 script. During the same year, the /soc/ board was created in an effort to reduce the number of socialization threads on /b/.
/r9k/ was restored on 23 October 2011, along with /hc/ ("Hardcore", previously deleted), /pol/ (a rebranding of /new/) and the new /diy/ board, in addition to an apology by Poole where he recalls how he criticized the deletion of Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopædia Dramatica was a satirical open wiki that used MediaWiki software. Launched on December 10, 2004, it lampooned both encyclopedic topics and current events, especially those related or relevant to contemporary internet culture. It was frequently utilized by a socially fluid and dynamic...
, and realized that he had done the same.
4chan has been the target of occasional denial of service attacks
Denial-of-service attack
A denial-of-service attack or distributed denial-of-service attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users...
. For instance, on December 28, 2010, 4chan went down due to a such an attack. Christopher Poole said on his blog "We now join the ranks of MasterCard
MasterCard
Mastercard Incorporated or MasterCard Worldwide is an American multinational financial services corporation with its headquarters in the MasterCard International Global Headquarters, Purchase, Harrison, New York, United States...
, Visa, PayPal
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....
, et al.—an exclusive club!"
Christopher Poole
Christopher Poole kept his real life identity hidden until it was revealed on July 9, 2008, in The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
. Before that time he had used the alias "moot". The same day, Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist, notably the author of the novels Warp , Codex , The Magicians and The Magician King...
of Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
published an interview describing Poole's influence as a non-visible administrator as "one of the most [significant]" on the evolution of content collaboration. Although Grossman's article began with the confession that "I don't even know his real name", he claimed to identify moot as Christopher Poole. Later, on July 10, Grossman admitted that there was an outside chance that Christopher Poole was not moot's real name, rather an obscure reference to a 4chan inside joke. The Washington Post concurred that "Christopher Poole" could be "all a big hoax, a 'gotcha.' It would be just what you'd expect from the creator of 4chan." In March 2009, Time backpedaled somewhat on the issue by placing the moot persona on the 2009 Time 100
Time 100
Time 100 is an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, as assembled by Time. First published in 1999 as a result of a debate among several academics, the list has become an annual event.-History and format:...
finalists list.
Prior to the Wall Street Journal and Time interviews, Poole deliberately kept his real identity separate from 4chan. He told Grossman "my personal private life is very separate from my Internet life ... There's a firewall in between." As moot, he has spoken at conferences at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. A 2008 article in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
had him down as "the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of", though he has since been described in more limited terms such as "benefactor".
In February 2009, The Washington Post reported that Poole had attended Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Commonwealth University is a public university located in Richmond, Virginia. It comprises two campuses in the Downtown Richmond area, the product of a merger between the Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia in 1968...
for a few semesters before dropping out. It reported that Christopher Poole was living with his mother while looking for a way to make money from owning 4chan.
In April 2009, Poole was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine. The results were questioned even before the poll completed, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing
Ballot stuffing
Ballot stuffing is the illegal act of one person submitting multiple ballots during a vote in which only one ballot per person is permitted. The name originates from the earliest days of this practice in which people literally did stuff more than one ballot in a ballot box at the same time...
were used to influence the vote. 4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely, when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME
The Game (mind game)
The Game is a mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which, according to the rules of The Game, must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The Game; players can only attempt to...
."
On September 12, 2009, Poole gave a talk on why 4chan has a reputation as a "Meme Factory" at the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna, Austria, which was part of the Paraflows 09 festival, themed Urban Hacking. In this talk, Poole mainly attributed this to the anonymous system, and to the lack of data retention on the site ("The site has no memory.").
On February 10, 2010, Poole spoke at the TED2010 conference
TED (conference)
TED is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading"....
in Long Beach, California
Long Beach, California
Long Beach is a city situated in Los Angeles County in Southern California, on the Pacific coast of the United States. The city is the 36th-largest city in the nation and the seventh-largest in California. As of 2010, its population was 462,257...
. He spoke about the increasing prevalence of persistent user identities and the sharing of personal information on sites like Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
and Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
and he also spoke about the value of anonymous posting on sites like 4chan. Fred Leal of the Brazilian newspaper Estadão
O Estado de S. Paulo
O Estado de S. Paulo is a daily newspaper published in the Metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil, and distributed mainly nationally. It is owned by Grupo Estado, a holding company which publishes the Jornal da Tarde and owns the radios Rádio Eldorado AM and FM and the Agência Estado, largest...
said his inclusion in the conference "indicates that something extraordinary is happening... [4chan] challenges every Internet convention: it is, alone, the antithesis of Google, social networking sites, and blogs."
In 2010, Poole was reported to have raised $625,000 to create a new online enterprise, called "Canvas
Canvas Networks
Canvas Networks is a social website centered on sharing and remixing media, particularly images. The website was founded by the owner of 4chan, Christopher Poole, and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, and Joshua Schachter.- Company and funding :Reports...
". The website opened on January 31, 2011, and features digitally modified images uploaded by users who are required to self-identify using Facebook Connect.
In April 2010, Poole gave evidence in the trial United States of America v. David Kernell
Sarah Palin email hack
The Sarah Palin email hack occurred on September 16, 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign when the Yahoo! personal email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was subjected to unauthorized access...
as a government witness. As a witness, he explained the terminology used on 4chan to the prosecutor, ranging from "OP" to "lurker". He also explained to the court the nature of the data given to the FBI as part of the search warrant, including how users can be uniquely identified from site audit logs.
In a 2010 interview, Poole discussed his belief in the value of multiple identities, including anonymity, in contrast to the merge of online and real-world identities occurring on Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
and many other social networking sites.
Links to Anonymous and Project Chanology
4chan has been labeled as the starting point of the Anonymous meme by The Baltimore City PaperBaltimore City Paper
Baltimore City Paper is a free alternative weekly newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland, founded in 1977 by Russ Smith and Alan Hirsch. Current owner Times-Shamrock Communications purchased the paper in 1987...
, due to the norm of posts signed with the "Anonymous" moniker. The National Post
National Post
The National Post is a Canadian English-language national newspaper based in Don Mills, a district of Toronto. The paper is owned by Postmedia Network Inc. and is published Mondays through Saturdays...
s David George-Cosh said it has been "widely reported" that Anonymous is associated with 4chan and 711chan
Imageboard
An imageboard or image board is a type of Internet forum that revolves around the posting of images. The first imageboards were created in Japan, and many English-language imageboards today are centered around Japanese culture...
, as well as numerous Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...
(IRC) channels.
Through its association with Anonymous, 4chan has become associated with Project Chanology
Project Chanology
Project Chanology is a protest movement against the practices of the Church of Scientology by members of Anonymous, a leaderless Internet-based group that defines itself as ubiquitous...
, a worldwide protest against the Church of Scientology
Church of Scientology
The Church of Scientology is an organization devoted to the practice and the promotion of the Scientology belief system. The Church of Scientology International is the Church of Scientology's parent organization, and is responsible for the overall ecclesiastical management, dissemination and...
held by members of Anonymous. On January 15, 2008, a 4chan user posted to /b/, suggesting participants "do something big" against the Church of Scientology's website. This message resulted in the Church receiving threatening phone calls. It quickly grew into a large real-world protest. Unlike previous Anonymous attacks, this action was characterized by 4chan meme
Meme
A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
s including rickroll
Rickrolling
Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch; a person provides a hyperlink seemingly relevant to the topic at hand, but actually leads to Astley's video...
s and Guy Fawkes mask
Guy Fawkes mask
The Guy Fawkes mask is a stylised depiction of Guy Fawkes, the best-known member of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up the British House of Lords in 1605...
s. The raid drew criticism from some 4chan users who felt it would bring the site undesirable attention.
/b/ imageboard
The "random" board, /b/, follows the design of Futaba Channel's Nijiura board. It was the first board created, and is by far 4chan's most popular board, with 30% of site traffic. Gawker.comGawker.com
Gawker is a newsmagazine/blog based in New York City that bills itself as "the source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip" and focuses on celebrities and the media industry....
's Nick Douglas summarized /b/ as a board where "people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other." /b/ has a "no rules" policy, except for bans on certain illegal content, such as child pornography
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
, invasions of other websites (posting floods of disruptive content), and under-18 viewing, all of which are inherited from site-wide rules. The "no invasions" rule was added in late 2006, after /b/ users spent most of the summer "invading" Habbo Hotel
Habbo
Habbo is a social networking site aimed at teenagers. The website is owned and operated by Sulake Corporation. The service began in 2000 and has expanded to include 11 online communities , with users in over 150 countries. As of August 2011, over 230 million avatars have been registered...
. The "no rules" policy also applies to actions of administrators and moderators, which means that users may be banned at any time, for any reason, including no reason at all. Due partially to its anonymous nature, board moderation is not always successful—indeed, the site's anti-child pornography rule is a subject of jokes on /b/. Christopher Poole told The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, in a discussion on the moderation of /b/, that "the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards" and that site staff simply provided a framework.
The humor of /b/'s many users, who refer to themselves as "/b/tards", is often incomprehensible to newcomers and outsiders, and is characterized by intricate inside joke
In-joke
An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or in joke, is a joke whose humour is clear only to people who are in a particular social group, occupation, or other community of common understanding...
s and black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
. Users often refer to each other, and much of the outside world, as fags. They are often referred to by outsiders as trolls
Troll (Internet)
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response...
, who regularly act with the intention of "doing it for the lulz": a corruption of "LOL
LOL
LOL is an acronym or abbreviation of "laughing out loud", "lots of luck", or "lots of love". In medical slang, it is used as an acronym for "little old lady", a reference to the novel House of God.LOL or Lol may also refer to:...
" used to denote amusement at another's expense
Schadenfreude
Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This German word is used as a loanword in English and some other languages, and has been calqued in Danish and Norwegian as skadefryd and Swedish as skadeglädje....
. The New York Observer has described posters as "immature pranksters whose bad behavior is encouraged by the site's total anonymity and the absence of an archive". Douglas said of the board, "reading /b/ will melt your brain", and cited Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopædia Dramatica was a satirical open wiki that used MediaWiki software. Launched on December 10, 2004, it lampooned both encyclopedic topics and current events, especially those related or relevant to contemporary internet culture. It was frequently utilized by a socially fluid and dynamic...
's definition of /b/ as "the asshole of the Internets
Internets
The Internet is a worldwide publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks.Where not capitalized, internet may refer to:* Any internetwork* A private network, referred to in RFC 1918 as "private internets"...
". Mattathias Schwartz of The New York Times likened /b/ to "a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line
Party line (telephony)
In twentieth-century telephone systems, a party line is an arrangement in which two or more customers are connected directly to the same local loop. Prior to World War II in the United States, party lines were the primary way residential subscribers acquired local telephone service...
", while Baltimore City Paper
Baltimore City Paper
Baltimore City Paper is a free alternative weekly newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland, founded in 1977 by Russ Smith and Alan Hirsch. Current owner Times-Shamrock Communications purchased the paper in 1987...
wrote that "in the high school of the Internet, /b/ is the kid with a collection of butterfly knives
Balisong (knife)
A Butterfly knife, also known as a fan knife or Balisong, is a folding pocket knife with two handles counter-rotating around the tang such that, when closed, the blade is concealed within grooves in the handles. It is sometimes called a Batangas knife, after the Tagalog province of Batangas in the...
and a locker full of porn." Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
describes /b/ as "notorious".
Each post is assigned a post number. Certain post numbers are sought after with a large amount of posting taking place to "GET" them. A "GET" occurs when a post's number ends in a special number, such as 12345678, 22222222, or every millionth post. A sign of 4chan's scaling, according to Poole, was when GETs lost meaning due to the high post rate resulting in a GET occurring every few weeks. He estimated /b/'s post rate in July 2008 to be 150,000–200,000 posts per day.
Memes
Internet memeInternet meme
The term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...
s are catchphrases or images that spread quickly, peer to peer
Peer-to-peer (meme)
Peer-to-peer is not restricted to technology, but covers every social process with a peer-to-peer dynamic, whether these peers are humans or computers. Peer-to-peer as a term originated from the popular concept of P2P distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between...
, across the Internet. Many Internet memes have originated on 4chan, usually /b/, as its fast moving, crowd psychology
Crowd psychology
Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology. Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. Historically, because large groups of people have been able to bring about dramatic and sudden social change in a manner that bypasses established due process, they have also...
nature enables content to quickly be passed on to large numbers of viewers.
Other memes originating on the site have gained media attention of a lesser degree. These include "So I herd u liek mudkip
Mudkip
Mudkip, known in Japan as , is a Pokémon species in Nintendo and Game Freak's Pokémon franchise. Created by Ken Sugimori, Mudkip first appeared in the video games Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire and subsequent sequels, later appearing in various merchandise, spinoff titles and animated and printed...
z", which involves a phrase based on Pokémon
Pokémon
is a media franchise published and owned by the video game company Nintendo and created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1996. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games developed by Game Freak, Pokémon has since become the second most successful and lucrative video...
, and which generated numerous YouTube tribute videos. 4chan, and other websites, such as the satirical Encyclopedia Dramatica, have also contributed to the development of significant amounts of leet
Leet
Leet , also known as eleet or leetspeak, is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters...
speak.
Lolcats
A lolcat is an image combining a photographPhotograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
of a cat
Cat
The cat , also known as the domestic cat or housecat to distinguish it from other felids and felines, is a small, usually furry, domesticated, carnivorous mammal that is valued by humans for its companionship and for its ability to hunt vermin and household pests...
with text intended to contribute humour
Humour
Humour or humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement...
. The text is often idiosyncratic
Idiosyncrasy
An idiosyncrasy is an unusual feature of a person . The term is often used to express eccentricity or peculiarity. A synonym may be .-Etymology:...
and grammatically incorrect. In 2005, the meme was widely popularized by 4chan in the form of "Caturday". Every Saturday, users posted pictures of cats with image macro
Image macro
In Internet culture, an image macro is a picture captioned with superimposed text for humorous effect.-Internet forums:On Internet forums and imageboards, image macros are used to emphasize a certain phrase by superimposing it over a related picture.-Formats:Although they come in many forms, the...
s relating to that day's theme.
Rickrolling
In 2005, a meme known as the "duckroll" began, after Poole used a word filterWordfilter
A wordfilter is a script typically used on Internet forums or chat rooms that automatically scans users' posts or comments as they are submitted and automatically changes or censors particular words or phrases.The most primitive wordfilters search only for a specific string and replaces it...
to change "egg" to "duck" across 4chan. Thus, words such as "eggroll" were changed to "duckroll". This led to a bait-and-switch in which external links disguised as relevant to a discussion instead led to a picture of a duck on wheels.
In March 2007, the trailer
Marketing for Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto IV is the first title in the fourth generation of the best-selling Grand Theft Auto video game franchise developed by Rockstar North which was released on 29 April 2008. As the release date approached, Rockstar had been marketing the game heavily...
for the video game Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto IV is a 2008 open world action video game published by Rockstar Games, and developed by British games developer Rockstar North. It has been released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 video game consoles, and for the Windows operating system...
was released. Its immense popularity caused publisher Rockstar Games
Rockstar Games
Rockstar Games is a major video game developer and publisher based in New York City, owned by Take-Two Interactive following its purchase of UK video game publisher BMG Interactive. The brand is mostly known for Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, L.A...
' website to crash
Crash (computing)
A crash in computing is a condition where a computer or a program, either an application or part of the operating system, ceases to function properly, often exiting after encountering errors. Often the offending program may appear to freeze or hang until a crash reporting service documents...
. An unidentified 4chan user applied the concept of the duckroll to what appeared to be a link to the trailer on YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, but instead showed the music video for Rick Astley
Rick Astley
Richard Paul "Rick" Astley is an English singer-songwriter, musician, and radio personality. He is known for his 1987 song, "Never Gonna Give You Up", which was a #1 hit single in 25 countries...
's 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up
Never Gonna Give You Up
A group of London dance producers, called The Rickrollerz made a house music cover version of "Never Gonna Give You Up" on that day, and in honor of that event....
". Thus, the "rickroll" was born. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Astley said he found the meme "bizarre and funny".
"Chocolate Rain"
A link to the YouTube video of Tay ZondayTay Zonday
Adam Nyerere Bahner , better known by the pseudonym Tay Zonday, is an American musician, YouTube personality and voice actor. He is well known by listeners for his deep baritone voice whilst singing. He garnered mainstream exposure when his song "Chocolate Rain", and accompanying video on YouTube,...
's song "Chocolate Rain" was posted on /b/ on July 11, 2007. The Age
The Age
The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...
reported that 4chan posters urged each other to "swarm" the video on YouTube and thus increase its ranking. The video became an immensely popular Internet meme, resulting in cover versions by John Mayer
John Mayer
John Clayton Mayer is an American pop rock and blues rock musician, singer-songwriter, recording artist, and music producer. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, he attended Berklee College of Music in Boston. He moved to Atlanta in 1997, where he refined his...
and Green Day
Green Day
Green Day is an American punk rock band formed in 1987. The band consists of lead vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist and backing vocalist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tre Cool...
drummer Tré Cool
Tre Cool
Frank Edwin Wright III, a.k.a. Tré Cool, is an American drummer, best known as the drummer for the punk rock band Green Day. He replaced the group's former drummer John Kiffmeyer in 1990...
. The portion of the song in which Zonday turns away from the microphone, with a caption stating "I move away from the mic to breathe in", became an oft-repeated meme on 4chan and inspired remixes.
Pedobear
In his American incarnation, Pedobear is an anthropomorphic bear child predator that is often used within the community to mock contributors showing a sexual interest in children. Pedobear is one of the most popular memes on non-English imageboards, and has gained recognition across Europe. In February 2010, a photoshopped version of Pedobear appeared along with mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games mascots
The mascots for the 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2010 Winter Paralympics were Miga and Quatchi, and Sumi respectively, who had a "sidekick", Mukmuk. The four mascots were introduced on November 27, 2007. They were designed by the Canadian and American duo, Meomi Design...
in an article on the games in Gazeta Olsztyńska
Gazeta Olsztynska
Gazeta Olsztyńska is a Polish language newspaper, published in Olsztyn.The newspaper was first published in the years 1886-1939, in what was then East Prussia...
, a Polish newspaper. This was done accidentally, due to the image being used from Google Images, the authors were unaware of the joke. Similarly, the Dutch television guide Avrobode used one of the images. It has been used as a symbol of pedophilia by Maltese
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
graffiti vandals prior to a papal visit.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
In October 2010, The Hub launched the animated cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The Cartoons and Comics board (or /co/ for short) took an interest the show, including its in jokes aimed at adult viewers, such as references to X-MenX-Men
The X-Men are a superhero team in the . They were created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, and first appeared in The X-Men #1...
, 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
, and Diamond Dogs
Diamond Dogs
Diamond Dogs is a concept album by David Bowie, originally released by RCA Records in 1974. Thematically it was a marriage of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Bowie's own glam-tinged vision of a post-apocalyptic world...
. This reaction soon spread to the general forum, /b/, where elements of the show quickly caught on as recurring jokes, and spread as memes to other forums around the Internet. Though many of the fan-created elements of the show use copyrighted footage of the show and combine them with mature themed elements such as from R-rated films such as Inglourious Basterds or foul language from artists such as Wu-Tang Clan
Wu-Tang Clan
The Wu-Tang Clan is a hip-hop group from Staten Island that consists of RZA, GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa, and the late Ol' Dirty Bastard. They are frequently joined by fellow childhood friend Cappadonna, a quasi member of the group...
, Hasbro has not taken a stance against these videos and has allowed them to continue to be hosted at various outlets, recognizing that the parodies and remixes form a "participatory culture" that has helped to draw larger attention to the show.
Internet attacks
According to the Washington Post, "the site's users have managed to pull off some of the highest-profile collective actions in the history of the Internet."Users of 4chan and other websites "raided" Hal Turner
Hal Turner
Harold Charles "Hal" Turner is an American white nationalist, Holocaust denier and blogger from North Bergen, New Jersey. In August 2010, he was convicted for making threats against three federal judges with the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals...
by launching DDoS attacks and prank call
Prank call
A prank call is a form of practical joke committed over the telephone. Prank phone calls began to gain an America-wide following over a period of many years, as they gradually became a staple of the obscure and amusing cassette tapes traded amongst musicians, sound engineers, and media traders...
ing his phone-in radio show during December 2006 and January 2007. The attacks caused Turner's website to go offline. This cost thousands of dollars of bandwidth bills according to Turner. In response, Turner sue
Filing (legal)
In law, filing is the act of submitting a document to the clerk of a court for the court's immediate consideration, for storage in the court's files, or both. Courts will not consider motions unless an appropriate memorandum or brief is filed before the appropriate deadline...
d 4chan, 7chan, and other websites; however, he lost his plea for an injunction
Injunction
An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a court order that requires a party to do or refrain from doing certain acts. A party that fails to comply with an injunction faces criminal or civil penalties and may have to pay damages or accept sanctions...
and failed to receive letters from the court.
KTTV
KTTV
KTTV, channel 11, is an owned-and-operated television station of the News Corporation-owned Fox Broadcasting Company, located in Los Angeles, California. Serving the vast Los Angeles metropolitan area, KTTV is a sister station to KCOP , Los Angeles' MyNetworkTV station...
Fox 11 aired a report on Anonymous
Anonymous (group)
Anonymous is an international hacking group, spread through the Internet, initiating active civil disobedience, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Originating in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, the term refers to the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic,...
, calling them a group of "hackers on steroids", "domestic terrorists", and collectively an "Internet hate machine" on July 26, 2007. Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
founder Rob Malda
Rob Malda
Rob Malda , also known as CmdrTaco, is founder and former editor-in-chief of the website Slashdot. He is a graduate of Hope College and Holland Christian High School....
posted a comment made by another Slashdot user, Miang, stating that the story focused mainly on users of "4chan, 7chan and 420chan". Miang claimed that the report "seems to confuse /b/ raids and motivational poster
Motivational poster
A motivational poster is a type of poster commonly designed for use in schools and offices.-Intent:The intent of motivational posters is to make people achieve more, or to think differently about the things that they may be learning or doing. This is not how everyone views such posters, however...
templates with a genuine threat to the American public", arguing that the "unrelated" footage of a van exploding shown in the report was to "equate anonymous posting with domestic terror".
On July 10, 2008, the swastika
Swastika
The swastika is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either right-facing form in counter clock motion or its mirrored left-facing form in clock motion. Earliest archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization of Ancient...
CJK unicode character
CJK Unified Ideographs
The Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts share a common background. In the process called Han unification the common characters were identified, and named "CJK Unified Ideographs"...
(卐) appeared at the top of Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
's Hot Trends
Google Trends
Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages...
list—a tally of the most popular search terms in the United States—for several hours. It was later reported that the HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
numeric character reference
Numeric character reference
A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...
for the symbol had been posted on /b/, with a request to perform a Google search
Google search
Google or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....
for the string. A multitude of /b/ visitors followed the order and pushed the symbol to the top of the chart, though Google later removed the result.
Later that year, the private Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail is a web mail service provided by Yahoo!. It was inaugurated in 1997, and, according to comScore, Yahoo! Mail was the second largest web-based email service with 273.1 million users as of November 2010....
account of Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...
, Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
vice presidential
Vice President of the United States
The Vice President of the United States is the holder of a public office created by the United States Constitution. The Vice President, together with the President of the United States, is indirectly elected by the people, through the Electoral College, to a four-year term...
candidate in the 2008 United States presidential election
United States presidential election, 2008
The United States presidential election of 2008 was the 56th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 4, 2008. Democrat Barack Obama, then the junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain, the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona. Obama received 365...
, was hacked
Sarah Palin email hack
The Sarah Palin email hack occurred on September 16, 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign when the Yahoo! personal email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was subjected to unauthorized access...
by a 4chan user. This followed criticism of Palin and other politicians supposedly using private email accounts for governmental work. The hacker posted the account's password on /b/, and screenshot
Screenshot
A screenshot , screen capture , screen dump, screengrab , or print screen is an image taken by a computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor, television, or another visual output device...
s from within the account to Wikileaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
. A /b/ user then logged in and changed the password, posting a screenshot of his sending an email to a friend of Palin's informing her of the new password on the /b/ thread. However, he forgot to blank out the password in the screenshot. A multitude of /b/ users attempted to log in with the new password, and the account was automatically locked out by Yahoo!. The incident was criticized by some /b/ users, in that most reports on the hack focused on 4chan, rather than Palin's violation of campaign law. One user commented, "seriously, /b/. We could have changed history and failed, epically." The FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
and Secret Service
United States Secret Service
The United States Secret Service is a United States federal law enforcement agency that is part of the United States Department of Homeland Security. The sworn members are divided among the Special Agents and the Uniformed Division. Until March 1, 2003, the Service was part of the United States...
began investigating the incident shortly after its occurrence. On September 20 it was revealed they were questioning David Kernell, the son of Democratic
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
Tennessee State Representative
Tennessee House of Representatives
The Tennessee House of Representatives is the lower house of the Tennessee General Assembly, the state legislature of the U.S. state of Tennessee.-Constitutional requirements:...
Mike Kernell
Mike Kernell
Mike Kernell is a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives. Kernell is married with two children....
.
The stock price of Apple Inc. fell significantly in October 2008 after a hoax story was submitted to CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
's user-generated news site iReport.com
I-Report
iReport is CNN's citizen journalism initiative that allows people from around the globe to contribute pictures and video of breaking news stories from their own towns and neighborhood. It is similar to Wikinews in that it allows, and encourages, regular citizens to submit stories, photos and...
claiming that company CEO Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
had suffered a major heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
. The source of the story was traced back to 4chan.
In May 2009, members of the site attacked YouTube, posting pornographic
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
videos on the site. A 4chan member acknowledged being part of the attack, telling the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
that it was in response to YouTube "deleting music". In January 2010, members of the site attacked YouTube again in response to the suspension of YouTube user lukeywes1234 for failing to meet the minimum age requirement of thirteen. The videos uploaded by the user had apparently become popular with 4chan members, who subsequently became angered after the account was suspended and called for a new wave of pornographic videos to be uploaded to YouTube on January 6, 2010. Later the same year, 4chan made numerous disruptive pranks directed at singer Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber
Justin Drew Bieber is a Canadian pop/R&B singer, songwriter and actor. Bieber was discovered in 2008 by Scooter Braun, who came across Bieber's videos on YouTube and later became his manager...
.
In September 2010, in retaliation against the Motion Picture Association of America
Motion Picture Association of America
The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. , originally the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America , was founded in 1922 and is designed to advance the business interests of its members...
and the Recording Industry Association of America
Recording Industry Association of America
The Recording Industry Association of America is a trade organization that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States...
hiring of Aiplex Software
Aiplex Software
Aiplex Software is a company based in India contracted by the MPAA to deliver copyright notices to websites that they deem violate copyright laws, and distributed denial-of-service attacks to said sites if they fail to remove the offending content...
to launch cyberattacks against The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website which hosts magnet links and .torrent files, which allow users to share electronic files, including multimedia, computer games and software via BitTorrent...
, Anonymous members, recruited through posts on 4chan boards, subsequently initiated their own attacks, dubbed Operation Payback
Operation Payback
Operation Payback is a coordinated, decentralized group of attacks on opponents of Internet piracy by Internet activists using the "Anonymous" moniker - a group sometimes affiliated with the website 4chan. Operation Payback started as retaliation to distributed denial of service attacks on torrent...
, DDoS'ing the website of all three companies. The targeted websites usually went offline for a short period of time due to the attacks, before recovering.
A number of law firms associated with the anti-piracy industry were also affected, most notably the UK law firm ACS:Law
ACS:Law
ACS:Law was a United Kingdom law firm specialising in intellectual property law. Prior to 2009, its most notable case was the defence of a British national accused of public indecency in Dubai. The firm is best known for its actions against persons allegedly infringing copyright through...
, who had their web host account suspended multiple times due to the excessive traffic caused by the attacks. In retaliation for the initial attacks being called only a minor nuisance, Anonymous launched more attacks, bringing the site down yet again. After coming back up, the front page accidentally revealed a backup file of the entire website, which contained over 300 megabytes of private company emails, which were leaked to several torrents and across several sites on the Internet.
It has been suggested that the data leak could cost the law firm up to £500,000 in fines for breaching British Data Protection Laws.
in January 2011, BBC News reported that the law firm have announced they are to stop "chasing illegal file-sharers". Head of the ACS:Law Andrew Crossley in a statement to a court addressed issues which influenced the decision to back down "I have ceased my work...I have been subject to criminal attack. My e-mails have been hacked. I have had death threats and bomb threats."
Threats of violence
On October 18, 2006, the Department of Homeland SecurityUnited States Department of Homeland Security
The United States Department of Homeland Security is a cabinet department of the United States federal government, created in response to the September 11 attacks, and with the primary responsibilities of protecting the territory of the United States and protectorates from and responding to...
warned National Football League
National Football League
The National Football League is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing...
officials in Miami, New York City, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Oakland, and Cleveland about a possible threat involving the simultaneous use of dirty bomb
Dirty bomb
A dirty bomb is a speculative radiological weapon that combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. The purpose of the weapon is to contaminate the area around the explosion with radioactive material, hence the attribute "dirty"....
s at stadiums. The threat claimed that the attack would be carried out on October 22, the final day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan
Ramadan
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, which lasts 29 or 30 days. It is the Islamic month of fasting, in which participating Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex during daylight hours and is intended to teach Muslims about patience, spirituality, humility and...
. Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security expressed doubt concerning the credibility of the threats, but warned the relevant organizations as a precaution. The games proceeded as planned but under a higher level of security awareness. The threats came to light in the national media after Jake Brahm admitted to having posted the threats on 4chan and repeating them on other websites approximately 40 times. Brahm did not expect the message to be taken seriously since he "would never take anything posted on 4chan as fact"; an FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
official was quoted as saying the "credibility of [the threat] was beyond ridiculous". As a parody of the incident, 4chan temporarily added "Don't mess with football" as an additional rule for /b/.
"Hello, /b/.
On September 11, 2007, at 9:11 A.M. Central time, two pipe bombs will be remote-detonated at Pflugerville High School.
Promptly after the blast, I, along with two ther Anonymous, will charge the building, armed with a Bushmaster AR-15, IMI Galil AR, a vintage, government-issue M1 .30 Carbine, and a Benelli M4 semi auto shotgun."—The Pflugerville threat.
On October 20, 2006, Brahm turned himself in to federal authorities, and was charged with fabricating a fake terrorist threat and taken into custody. On February 28, 2008, he pled guilty to the federal charges. On June 5, 2008, he was sentenced to six months in prison, six months' house arrest, and ordered to pay $26,750 in restitution
Restitution
The law of restitution is the law of gains-based recovery. It is to be contrasted with the law of compensation, which is the law of loss-based recovery. Obligations to make restitution and obligations to pay compensation are each a type of legal response to events in the real world. When a court...
.
Around midnight on September 11, 2007, a student posted photographs of mock pipe bomb
Pipe bomb
A pipe bomb is an improvised explosive device, a tightly sealed section of pipe filled with an explosive material. The containment provided by the pipe means that simple low explosives can be used to produce a relatively large explosion, and the fragmentation of the pipe itself creates potentially...
s and another photograph of him holding them while saying he would blow up his high school—Pflugerville High School in Pflugerville
Pflugerville, Texas
Pflugerville is a city in Travis and Williamson counties in the U.S. state of Texas. The population was 16,335 at the 2000 census. A July 1, 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimate placed the population at 39,653...
, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
—at 9:11 a.m. on September 11. Users of 4chan helped to track him down by finding the perpetrator's father's name in the Exif
Exchangeable image file format
Exchangeable image file format is a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras , scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras...
data of a photograph he took, and contacted the police. He was arrested before school began that day. The incident turned out to be a hoax; the "weapons" were toys and there were no actual bombs.
Jarrad Willis, a 20-year-old from Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
was arrested on December 8, 2007, after apparently posting on 4chan that he was "going to shoot and kill as many people as I can until which time I am incapacitated or killed by the police". The post, accompanied by an image of another man holding a shotgun, threatened a shopping mall near Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills, California
Beverly Hills is an affluent city located in Los Angeles County, California, United States. With a population of 34,109 at the 2010 census, up from 33,784 as of the 2000 census, it is home to numerous Hollywood celebrities. Beverly Hills and the neighboring city of West Hollywood are together...
. While the investigation was still open, Willis was charged with criminal defamation for a separate incident but died before the case was heard.
On February 4, 2009, a posting on the 4chan /b/ said there would be a school shooting at St Eskils Gymnasium in Eskilstuna
Eskilstuna
Eskilstuna is a city and the seat of Eskilstuna Municipality, Södermanland County, Sweden with 60,185 inhabitants in 2005. Eskilstuna has a large Sweden Finn population....
, Sweden. 1250 students and 50 teachers were evacuated. A 21-year-old man was arrested after 4chan had provided the police with the IP address
IP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
of the poster. According to the police the suspect said it was a joke and he was released after they found no indication that the threat was serious.
Dusty the cat
On February 15, 2009, two videos featuring the physical abuse of a domestic cat named Dusty by a person calling himself "Timmy" were posted on YouTubeYouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
. The 4chan community was able to track down the originator of the videos, a fourteen-year-old from Lawton, Oklahoma
Lawton, Oklahoma
The city of Lawton is the county seat of Comanche County, in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. Located in the southwestern region of Oklahoma approximately southwest of Oklahoma City, it is the principal city of the Lawton Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Area...
, and passed his details to his local police department. As a result of this, a suspect was arrested and the cat was treated by a veterinarian and taken to a safe place.
AT&T temporary ban
On July 26, 2009, AT&TAT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
's DSL branch temporarily blocked access to the img.4chan.org domain (host of /b/ and /r9k/), which was initially believed to be an attempt at Internet censorship
Internet censorship
Internet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations either at the behest of government or on their own initiative...
, and met with hostility on 4chan's part.
On July 27, 2009, AT&T issued a statement claiming that the block was put in place after an AT&T customer was affected by a denial-of-service attack originating from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org, and was an attempt to "prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and... our other customers." AT&T maintains that the block was not related to the content on 4chan.
4chan's founder Christopher Poole responded with the following:
In the end, this wasn't a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit of a mistake and a poorly executed, disproportionate response on AT&T's part. Whoever pulled the trigger on blackholing the site probably didn't anticipate [nor intend] the consequences of doing so.
We're glad to see this short-lived debacle has prompted renewed interest and debate over net neutrality and Internet censorship—two very important issues that don't get nearly enough attention—so perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise.
Major news outlets have reported that the issue may be related to DDoSing of 4chan and that the suspicions of 4chan users fell on the person who owned Swedish-based Anontalk.com at that time for doing this.
Concerning the AT&T claims of DDoS attacks originating from 4chan, Poole confirmed it was due to a network error:
For the past three weeks, 4chan has been under a constant DDoS attack. We were able to filter this specific type of attack in a fashion that was more or less transparent to the end user.
Unfortunately, as an unintended consequence of the method used, some Internet users received errant traffic from one of our network switches. A handful happened to be AT&T customers
Verizon ban
On February 4, 2010, 4chan started receiving reports from Verizon WirelessVerizon Wireless
Cellco Partnership, doing business as Verizon Wireless, is one of the largest mobile network operators in the United States. The network has 107.7 million subscribers as of 2011, making it the largest wireless service provider in America....
customers that they were having difficulties accessing the site's image boards. After investigating, Poole found out that only traffic on port
TCP and UDP port
In computer networking, a port is an application-specific or process-specific software construct serving as a communications endpoint in a computer's host operating system. A port is associated with an IP address of the host, as well as the type of protocol used for communication...
80 to the boards.4chan.org domain was affected, leading members to believe that the block was intentional.
On February 7, 2010, Verizon Wireless confirmed that 4chan was "explicitly blocked". The block was lifted several days later.
External links
- 4chan homepage
- Official 4chan twitter page
- 4chan archive; an archive of selected 4chan threads
- Wired article on 'Chanology'
- TED seminar on 4chan
- Court testimony by "moot" about the Sarah Palin email hackSarah Palin email hackThe Sarah Palin email hack occurred on September 16, 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign when the Yahoo! personal email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was subjected to unauthorized access...
- FMRL|Future Media Research Lab article "Wheel of 4chan"