Coordinates | 40°13′12″N79°36′13″N |
---|---|
name | 4chan |
screenshot | 280px |
url | 4chan.org |
commercial | Yes |
type | |
language | English |
registration | None available |
owner | Christopher "moot" Poole |
launch date | October 1, 2003 |
alexa | 774 () }} |
4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet memes such as lolcats, 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."
The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards. 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 moot 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).
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. moot 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, moot 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 tripcodes 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, moot 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.
Prior to the ''Wall Street Journal'' and ''Time'' interviews, moot 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 moot was living with his mother while looking for a way to make money from owning 4chan.
In April 2009, moot 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, moot 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, moot 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, moot 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, moot explained the terminology used on 4chan to the prosecutor, ranging from "OP" to "lurker". moot 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.
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". During the same time, the "hardcore" pornography board at /hc/ existed briefly, before it was subsequently removed.
In January 2011, moot 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/.
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 memes including rickrolls and Guy Fawkes masks. The raid drew criticism from some 4chan users who felt it would bring the site undesirable attention.
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 jokes 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". Matthias 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 moot, was when GETs lost meaning due to the high post rate resulting in a GET occurring every few weeks. moot estimated /b/'s post rate in July 2008 to be 150,000–200,000 posts per day.
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".
Users of 4chan and other websites "raided" Hal Turner by launching DDoS attacks and prank calling 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 sued 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 screenshots 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."
"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."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.—The Pflugerville threat.
Around midnight on September 11, 2007, a student posted photographs of mock pipe bombs 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.
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 moot 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, moot 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
Category:2channel Category:American websites Category:Community websites Category:Internet forums Category:Internet memes Category:Internet properties established in 2003
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