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4chan
File:4chan front page.pngThe 4chan homepage on August 3, 2008
Type of siteImageboard
Available inEnglish
Ownermoot (allegedly "Christopher Poole")
URLhttp://www.4chan.org/
CommercialYes
RegistrationNone available

4chan is an English-language imageboard website based on the Japanese-language Futaba Channel. Launched on October 1, 2003 by "moot" (allegedly "Christopher Poole"), its boards are primarily used for the posting of pictures and discussion of manga and anime. 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".

The "/b/" board is by far 4chan's most popular forum. It is dubbed the "random" board; there are minimal rules on posted content. It is thus notorious on the Internet; Gawker.com claimed in jest that "reading /b/ will melt your brain".

The site has generated broad media attention, and its members have been responsible for the formation and popularization of 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.

Background

4chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of "moot", a 15 year old boy from New York City. He intended the site to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and television shows, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel boards. moot purchased the server space for 4chan using his mother's credit card, with her approval. Prior to starting 4chan, moot had been a regular participant on the Something Awful forums.

The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards. The boards are split into five categories; Japanese Culture, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). The categories include boards on topics such as anime, manga, technology, sport, photography, music, hentai, torrents, travel, fitness, and random. 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, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet. However, the pornographic content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content from advertising. 4chan's Alexa rank is generally around 1000, though it has been as high as number 56 at times. 4chan is one of the Internet's most trafficked imageboards, according to The Los Angeles Times.

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", a running gag on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person, but a collective of 4chan users. Moderators will generally post without a name even when performing sysops actions. A "capcode" may be used to attribute the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", although moderators often post without the 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 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 channels.

Through its association with Anonymous, 4chan has become 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" against the Church of Scientology's website. This message resulted in the Church receiving, by its own reports, more than 6,000 threatening phone calls. Unlike previous Anonymous attacks, this action was characterized by 4chan inside jokes, including rickrolls and Guy Fawkes masks. The raid drew criticism from some 4chan users who felt it would bring the site unnecessary attention.

/b/

The "random" board, /b/, follows the design of Futaba Channel's Nijiura board. It is by far 4chan's most popular board. Gawker.com's Nick Douglas summarizes /b/ as a board where "people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other". 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 150-200,000 posts per day.

/b/ has 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—indeed, the site's anti-child pornography rule is the subject of jokes on /b/. 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 characterized by intricate inside jokes and black comedy. Users will 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 accumulating "lulz"—a variation of "LOL" used to denote laughter at another's expense. 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", while Baltimore City Paper wrote that "/b/ is the kid with a collection of butterfly knives and a locker full of porn ... in the high school of the Internet". Wired describes /b/ as notorious.

Memes

Internet memes 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 nature enables content to quickly be passed on to large numbers of viewers. The most notable of these memes are lolcats, rickrolling, and "Chocolate Rain". Other memes originating on the site have gained media attention of a lesser degree. These include "So I herd u liek mudkipz" [sic], which involves a phrase based on Pokemon, 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 leetspeak.

lolcats

Main article: lolcat
The lolcat replying to the question "I can has cheezburger?"

In 2005, the lolcat meme began on 4chan as "Caturday". Every Saturday, users posted pictures of cats with image macros relating to that day's theme. One Caturday, a user posted a picture of a cat asking "I can has cheezburger?", and received a reply of the same cat in a different pose declaring "Do not want!". Neither of these were related to the day's theme, and following this, the "rule" that cat pictures had to relate to a theme was lifted. The lolcat meme later spread to other animals; an example being the O RLY? owl—an image macro of the words "O RLY?" superimposed on an image of the Snowy Owl, generally used in sarcasm.

rickrolling

Main article: rickrolling

In 2005, the meme of the "duckroll" began when moot used a word filter 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 lead 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 duckroll on a link to the site to link to a YouTube video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead of a picture of a duck. Thus, the "rickroll" was born. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Astley said he found the meme "bizarre and funny".

"Chocolate Rain"

Main article: Chocolate Rain

A link to the YouTube video of Tay Zonday'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 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 a an oft-repeated meme on 4chan and inspired remixes.

Media attention

Internet attacks

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

On January 9, 2006, eBaum's World violated copyright laws in hosting an image of Lindsay Lohan originally posted on YTMND. As a result, users of 4chan, YTMND, Something Awful, and Newgrounds participated in a "raid" 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" Hal Turner by launching DDoS attacks and prank calling his phone-in radio show. 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.

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", 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 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/ visitors followed the order and pushed the symbol to the top of the chart, though Google later removed the result.

On September 17, 2008, 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 had followed criticism of Palin and other politicians supposedly using private email accounts for parliamentary 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, the account was automatically locked out by Yahoo!. The incident was criticized by some /b/ users, one of which complained that "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 the son of Democrat State Representative Mike Kernell.

Threats of violence

See also: Jake Brahm

On October 18, 2006 the Department of Homeland Security 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 bombs 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 blogger Jake Brahm admitted to have posted the threats on 4chan and 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", while an FBI official was quoted as saying the "credibility of 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.

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.

Jarrad Willis, a 20 year old from Melbourne, was arrested on December 8, 2007, for posting on 4chan that "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 was accompanied by an image, uploaded by Willis, of a man who threatened a shopping mall near Beverly Hills holding a shotgun. The post and image were later deleted from the site. Willis was charged with criminal defamation, but died before the case was heard.

moot's identity

moot at the 2008 ROFLCon

moot's alleged real-world identity—"Christopher Poole"— was revealed on July 9, 2008 in The Wall Street Journal. That day, Lev Grossman of TIME published an interview describing his influence as a non-visible administrator as "one of the most " on the evolution of on-line 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 in print that there was only a 5% chance that Christopher Poole was not moot's real name, but instead a reference to several 4chan inside jokes. 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. The Observer describes moot as "the most influential web entrepreneur you've never heard of".

References

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