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Revision as of 05:11, 15 July 2005
The Gay Nigger Association of America, also known as the GNAA, is a self-aggrandizing Internet troll organization that primarily targets Internet communities in an effort to disrupt their normal activities and annoy their users. The name itself has been designed to shock and offend and appears to have been chosen because homosexuality is still an uncomfortable subject for some, and the term "nigger" is a slang term for black people, generally considered a racist slur. The term "Association of America" is somewhat misleading because the organization has participants from countries other than the United States.
Members have flooded weblogs, produced shock sites, prank-called technical support telephone lines, and flooded, mass-invited, and trolled IRC chat rooms. As a consequence, the communities that are attacked treat GNAA members as nuisances and frequently respond with technological and social anti-trolling measures (such as comment moderation) to limit future disruption caused by trolling.
Background information
The group originated in the comments section of the Slashdot website. It claims to consist of six leaders and approximately 30 to 40 other members. GNAA first appeared in January 2003, trolling Slashdot using ASCII art logos representing the organization and satirical news releases pertaining to the contents of Slashdot articles.
The GNAA website states: "We do not support and do not promote racism, homophobia, etc."
Membership
GNAA encourages people to join by watching the 1992 Danish low-budget movie Gayniggers From Outer Space, from which their name derives. The GNAA's entry requirements also include successfully achieving a "first post" on Slashdot consisting of GNAA troll text, or registering support by upwardly moderating GNAA comments. A test on the subject matter in Gayniggers From Outer Space is then administered by an IRC bot.
The GNAA has a signature which their members use whenever they perform a crapflood or post a news release. The full "sig", which includes an embedded ASCII art picture of the letters "GNAA" on a wall, can be found on their website. It begins:
- GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
- Are you GAY?
- Are you a NIGGER?
- Are you a GAY NIGGER?
- If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Activities
GNAA gained notoriety in the Slashdot community when they launched several flood attacks against the site. Slashdot subsequently implemented open proxy-banning measures in its posting system; GNAA members claim that their crapflooding campaign spurred this change. They registered thousands of usernames en masse to mark Slashdot editor "michael" as their foe.
Jodi Dean, Associate Professor of Political Science (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), in a presentation on blogging for a Cultural Studies Association meeting in Tuscon, noted that when she started blogging she was disturbed by neo-Nazi attacks and that:
- I’ve also been unsettled by those I can’t place, those who may be satirical, performative in non-pc ways, and those whose comments are just generally disruptive and malicious. For example, one guy posted from the GNAA—which seems to be an anti-blog group with various satirical elements and strategies for irritating bloggers. GNAA stands for Gay Nigger Association of America and apparently gets its name from a short 1992 Danish movie called Gay Niggers from Outerspace, a film that appears to be an actual movie, a porn send up, but I can’t be completely sure.
During May 2004, GNAA members flooded the popular image board 4chan, contributing to the fourth non-permanent shutdown of the site shortly thereafter. In the list of reasons why it closed down, the administrator wrote: "Flooding. GNAA put the final nail in the coffin, however I am thankful that they willingly ceased the flood after finding out it was costing me money." However, a poster on the Something Awful Forums later stated that this was only one of several factors that caused them to be shut down: "It was not the GNAA who killed 4chan (I quite like them actually), or really the moronic users, it was a man named Chris, who goes by the name TheRowan and runs a business that shuts you down if you fail to play along." They later reattacked 4chan, reportedly due to a violation of the terms established between a GNAA member and 4chan's owner, moot, although moot and the rest of the 'team' denies any such terms were enacted.
In July 2004, GNAA member JesuitX submitted leaked screenshots of the then-forthcoming operating system Mac OS X v10.4 to popular Apple Macintosh news website MacRumors. A report on the site reads "With WWDC just days away, the first Tiger information and screenshots appears to have been leaked. According to sources, Apple will reportedly provide developers with a Mac OS X 10.4 Preview copy at WWDC on Monday. The screenshots provided reportedly come from this upcoming developer preview." When the source was found to be from the GNAA, many declared the screenshots to be fake, based on the organization's apparent disreputability. The GNAA released a press release which claimed that the screenshots were genuine (cf. official Apple screenshots), and that the Apple community had been trolled.
In late 2004, the GNAA discovered vulnerabilities in weblogging service Xanga. In a related attack, they launched a Denial of Service attack on Slashdot, taking down its search engine for a few days.
In June 2005, the GNAA created a fake Mac OS X Tiger release for Intel x86 processors which caught media attention from Mac Daily News. The supposed leak also made front page news on Slashdot and was mentioned on the G4 show Attack of the Show. The DVD image released onto BitTorrent merely booted an image of hello.jpg (goatse). The remaining several gigabytes of space were filled with the text "GNAAGNAA...." repeating.
GNAA members have created the shock site Last Measure, which often factors into their crapfloods as the destination of links or redirects, and made its source code available under the revised BSD license.
GNAA also runs a conference call system, which they use to troll various companies and people, including AOL. They have produced an MP3 which combines samples from their prank AOL calls with the "Hey, everybody! I'm looking at gay porno!" voice from Last Measure.
Trivia
- The GNAA has created many scripts to carry out its activities, including specialized scripts for crapflooding sites.
- On Freenode's IRC server, the #GNAA channel redirects to #you_have_got_to_be_kidding with a warning message indicating that the network might be inappropriate. This is standard Freenode behavior for juped channels. Other IRC networks similarly jupe #GNAA.
- In contrast to their lo-fi ASCII text sigs, the GNAA website appears to parody the slick design of many corporate websites. It features pictures of African American athletes and professionals, apparently taken from stock image archives.
See also
- Slashdot trolling phenomena
- Internet troll
- Trolltalk
- l0de Radio Hour
- GNAUK - this United Kingdom branch is mentioned in some GNAA press releases (sources: 1, 2, 3)
References
- http://www.gnaa.us/about.phtml - Information about the GNAA.
- http://www.gnaa.us/about.phtml - Information about the GNAA.
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=100374&threshold=-1 Slashdot.org (March 13, 2004) - I, Robot Trailer available. Crapflooded article.
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=100381&threshold=-1 Slashdot.org (March 13, 2004) - Intel Plans CPU Naming Change. Crapflooded article.
- http://slashdot.org/~michael/freaks Slashdot editor Michael's "freaks list"
- I cite : Blogging Theory, April 24, 2005. Jodi's presentation can be found here.
- http://www.4chan.org/ 4Chan.org
- http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=724028
- http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2004/06/20040626041303.shtml Mac Rumours (June 26, 2004) - Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Screenshots?
- http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2004/06/20040627202026.shtml Mac Rumours (June 27, 2004) - WWDC, Photos and More on Tiger.
- http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-77079 Mac Rumours (2004) - Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Screenshots? (discussion)
- http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=520
- http://www.gnaa.us/pr.phtml?troll=gnaa-apple GNAA press release - GNAA Announces Victory over Apple Community.
- http://lists.netsys.com/pipermail/full-disclosure/2005-January/030506.html
- http://blog.mytechaid.com/archives/2005/01/02/attack-of-the-killer-xanga/
- http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/28/161214/43
- http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/6012/
- http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/12/130234&tid=179&tid=1 Slashdot.org (June 12, 2005) - Fake Mac OS X X86 makes Front Page news.
- http://forums.anti-slash.org/viewtopic.php?t=577
- http://lastmeasure.com
External links
- GNAA Site
- GNAA IRC Channel
- Google: Query for name GNAA on Slashdot website
- Gayniggers from Outer Space at IMDb
- "James A. C. Joyce" (GNAA member rolloffle) (February 3, 2004). Why your Movable Type blog must die. Kuro5hin.org.