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4chan
Official 4chan logo
File:4chan front page.pngThe main page of 4chan.org as of March 1, 2008.
Type of siteImageboard
Available inEnglish
Ownermoot ("Christopher Poole")
URL4chan.org
CommercialYes
RegistrationNo

4chan is an English-language imageboard website based on the Japanese-language Futaba Channel. Launched on October 1, 2003 by "moot" ("Christopher Poole"), its boards are based primarily around the posting of pictures and discussion of Japanese comics and television shows. Users generally post anonymously, and the site has been linked to "Anonymous" culture and Project Chanology. The Guardian describes 4chan as "at once brilliant, ridiculous and alarming."

4chan's "/b/" board, dedicated to random postings, is the most active and is notorious on the Internet; Gawker.com claimed in jest that "reading /b/ will melt your brain". The site has generated significant media attention, and its members have been responsible for the formation and popularization of several Internet memes such as lolcats, rickrolling, and the popularity of the Tay Zonday song "Chocolate Rain". It has also received media attention for its attacks against other websites and Internet users, and for the threats of real world violence that have been posted on it.

Formation

4chan was started in 2003 by 15 year old "moot", in his New York bedroom. He initially intended the site to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and television shows, intended as an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel boards, also known as 2chan. moot purchased the server space for 4chan using his mother's credit card. According to The Toronto Star, moot's inspiration for the site also came from the Something Awful forums, where he was a regular participant.

moot's identity

moot had his alleged real-world identity—"Christopher Poole"—revealed on July 9, 2008 in The Wall Street Journal. On the same day, Lev Grossman of TIME published an interview with him, describing him as "one of the most powerful people on the Web". The Observer called moot "the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of".

moot grew up in suburban New York City and started 4chan in his bedroom in the year 2003. He deliberately kept his real identity seperate from 4chan, telling TIME "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. On July 10, Grossman wrote that there was a 5% chance that Christopher Poole was not moot's real name, but a reference to several 4chan inside jokes.

Layout

The activity of 4chan takes place on discussion boards, image and upload boards, and drawing boards. There are numerous different image boards, generally covering topics related to Japanese culture. 4chan once hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called "world4ch", but these were later moved to the dis.4chan.org subdomain. The site has one employee; a programmer who moot met via online Tetris. All other moderators are volunteers.

Because 4chan is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth, its financing often becomes problematic. moot acknowledges that donations alone can not keep the site online, and so regularly has to turn to advertising. It has also had problems using online payment services, such as PayPal, YowCow, and the Authorize.Net payment gateway. The pornographic content hosted on 4chan has made it difficult to advertise, with few businesses wanting to be associated with 4chan's content.

Anonymity

4chan consists of a collection of imageboards which allow users to post anonymously without having to provide any form of identification. Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have any kind of registration system. On boards the poster can use any nickname to his or her liking, making it possible to post under the name of someone else by entering their name into the posting form. 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," a running gag on 4chan that Anonymous is in fact not a single person, but a collective whole of 4chan. Moderators will generally post without a name even when performing moderation actions. In this case, a "capcode" may be used, attributing the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", though moderators are welcome to post without a capcode.

Links to "Anonymous" and Project Chanology

See also: Anonymous (group) and Project Chanology

4chan has been labeled as the starting point of the Anonymous meme by The Baltimore City Paper, due to the norm of posts being made with the "Anonymous" moniker. The State News reported that Anonymous was "a loose coalition of Internet denizens" that congregated on 4chan. 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 channels.

Through its association with Anonymous, 4chan has been associated with Project Chanology, an organization that holds worldwide protests against the Church of Scientology. On January 15, 2008 a 4chan user posted to /b/ suggesting participants "do something big" to the Church of Scientology's website. This resulted in the Church receiving, by its reports, more than 6000 threatening phone calls. Unlike previous Anonymous attacks, this one was characterized by 4chan inside jokes, such as rickrolls and Guy Fawkes masks. The raid drew criticism from some 4chan users who felt it would bring the site unnecessary attention.

/b/

File:Example 4chan random board thread.png
Example of a thread on /b/, where posters attempt to "get" a post with a reply number ending in 53.

The "random" board, /b/, follows in the design of Futaba Channel's Nijiura board. It is by far 4chan's most popular board. According to Gawker.com, /b/ is a board where "people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other". Certain post numbers, such as 12345678, 22222222 and every millionth post, are sought after with a large amount of posting taking place to "GET" them.

/b/ is known to officially have a "no rules" policy, save for a ban on certain illegal content, such as child pornography, invasions of other websites, and under-18 viewing, all of which are inherited from site-wide rules. This "no rules" policy applies to administrator and moderator actions as well, meaning 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. moot 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 frequently characterized by intricate inside jokes and black comedy. /b/ users are referred to by outsiders as trolls, whose intention is to accumulate "lulz". Gawker.com's Nick Douglas said of the board, "reading /b/ will melt your brain", and cited Encyclopedia Dramatica's definition of /b/ as "the asshole of the Internet". Mattathias Schwartz of The New York Times likened /b/ to a "a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line".

Memes

Lolcats

An example of a lolcat

In 2005 the lolcat Internet meme was started on 4chan as "Caturday", Saturdays on which users would post pictures of cats, eventually adding image macros relating to the day's theme. The "Caturday" theme was broken after one user posted a cat saying "I can has cheezburger?", and received a reply of the same cat in a different pose saying "Do not want!". At this point the meme changed from "Caturday" related captions, to any caption, and its popularity increased greatly, resulting in the well known lolcat meme.

Rickrolling

2005 also saw the introduction of the "duckroll". This meme began with moot changing the word "egg" to "duck" in every post made. Following this, 4chan users would randomly post links to an image of a duck on wheels. This was followed by rickrolling, involving links to the YouTube video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". Rickrolling came as a result of a 4chan user linking to Astley's video, rather than a duck image, when providing a prank link supposedly pointing to the Grand Theft Auto IV demo. Astley told the Los Angeles Times he found the meme "bizarre and funny".

"Chocolate Rain"

A link to the YouTube video of "Chocolate Rain", a song by Tay Zonday, was posted on 4chan on July 11, 2007. Zonday believes it was this posting that led to the popularity of his song; he told website HHNLive that "I'm pretty sure the 'Chocolate Rain' attention started as a joke at 4chan.org". The Age reported that 4chan posters urged each other to "swarm" the video on YouTube and thus increase its ranking. The video has become an immensely popular internet meme, resulting in covers by John Mayer and Green Day drummer Tre 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 popular and has been repeated on 4chan regularly, as well as inspiring numerous remixes.

Other memes

More new memes would be developed by 4chan, such as "So I herd u liek mudkipz", a meme involving a phrase based on Pokemon, which resulted in numerous YouTube tribute videos.

Media attention

Internet attacks

See also: eBaum's World controversy and KTTV Fox 11 news report

In 2006 eBaum's World illegally hosted an image of Lindsay Lohan from YTMND. As a result, users of 4chan, YTMND, Something Awful and Newgrounds participated in an attack against the site including a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and flooding of the website's chat room, forums and technical support. The attack caused the forums to go offline for an unknown period of time.

In December 2006 and January 2007, users of 4chan and other websites "raided" white nationalist Hal Turner, taking his site offline through DDoS attacks, and costing thousands of dollars of bandwidth bills according to Turner. They also prank called his phone-in radio show. In response, Turner sued 4chan, 7chan, and other websites in court over copyright infringement; however, he lost his plea for an injunction and failed to receive letters from the court.

On July 26, 2007, KTTV Fox 11 aired a report on "Anonymous", calling them a group of "hackers on steroids", "domestic terrorists", and collectively an "Internet hate machine". 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", adding 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 symbol (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/ visiters followed the order and pushed the symbol to the top of the chart, though it was later removed by Google.

Threats of violence

See also: Jake Brahm

On October 18, 2006 the Department of Homeland Security warned NFL officials in Miami, New York City, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Oakland, and Cleveland about a possible threat involving the simultaneous use of dirty bombs at stadiums in those cities. 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 still 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 have posted the threats on 4chan, and on forty other websites. FOX News reported that the posts should not have been taken seriously as " would never take anything posted on 4chan as fact".

On October 20, 2006 Brahm turned himself in to federal authorities. He was charged with fabricating a fake terrorist threat and was taken into custody by police. On February 28, 2008, he plead 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.

File:4chan Pflugerville bomb threat.png
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 at 9:11 a.m. on Sept. 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 whole thing turned out to be a hoax; the "weapons" were toys and there were no actual bombs.

Jarrad Willis, a 20 year old Melbourne man, was arrested on December 8, 2007 for posting a statement on 4chan stating "I am going to shoot and kill as many people as I can until which time I am incapacitated or killed by the police". The post, which was accompanied by an image of another man holding a shotgun, uploaded by Willis, threatened a shopping mall near Beverly Hills. The post and image were later deleted off the site. Willis was later charged with criminal defamation, but he died before the case was heard.

See also

References

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  45. Ronald Smothers (2006-10-20). "Man, 20, Arrested in Stadium Threat Hoax". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-07-27. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  46. Sharon Gaudin (2008-06-16). "Man gets six months for posting terror threat online". PC World. Retrieved 2008-07-21. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  47. "4chanarchive - Thread 39101047". 4chanarchive.com. 2007-09-11. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
  48. "4chanarchive - Thread 39103157". 4chanarchive.com. 2007-09-11. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
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  52. "Pflugerville Student Arrested After Posting Bomb Threats". KXAN. 2007-09-12. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
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  54. "Teen arrested for threatening to blow up school". TWEAN News Channel of Austin, L.P. d.b.a. News 8 Austin. 2007-09-11. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
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  57. Associated Press (2008-12-08). "Australian Police Arrest Man Who Threatened to Attack Los Angeles Mall". Fox News. Retrieved 2008-07-14.
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  59. Associated Press (2007-12-09). "Student arrested after threats to attack campus". CNN. Retrieved 2008-07-14.
  60. Shaun Davies (2008-07-31). "Mall massacre hoax accused dies". ninemsn. Retrieved 2008-07-31.

External links

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