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The Gay Nigger Association of America (abbreviated GNAA) is a troll organization that primarily targets Internet communities in an effort to cause havoc and disrupt their normal activities. Although it is termed "Association of America", the organization claims to have members from all over the world.
Members engage in such activities as flooding weblogs, producing shock sites, prank-calling technical support telephone lines, and IRC channel disruption such as IRC floods. These actions have occasionally interrupted the normal operation of popular websites such as slashdot.org, even forcing some websites to shut down temporarily. As such, targeted communities generally consider GNAA members a nuisance and frequently respond with technological and social anti-trolling measures such as moderation systems to limit future disruption.
History
The 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. As with other troll organizations, members of the GNAA adopt pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity and their true identities are generally not known. While its number of members are unknown, the GNAA has listed members "timecop" as the founder and President and "jesuitx" as a co-founder and Vice President.
The GNAA's website features pictures of black athletes and professionals that appear to originate from stock image archives in an apparent attempt to parody the designs of various corporate websites. It states that the GNAA does not support or promote racism, homophobia, or other kinds of hatred. While their main motivation is simply to troll, they claim to have targeted websites and blogs that promote "anti Gaynigger and pro-Zionist propaganda".
GNAA members Rucas and Armorfist created a shock site called Last Measure, which the GNAA often links or redirects to in their various activities. In order to automate their activities, the GNAA has created many programmatic scripts for uses such as crapflooding sites. The source code of these scripts are usually made available under the revised BSD license. One such script is ASIAN, The Automated Synchronous IRC Abuse Network, a clone of a popular IRC flooding tool called AYSYN (Are you stupid? Yes/No) by mef. It was created by members Rucas and abez due to the many bugs found in AYSYN and the lack of source code. It uses SOCKS proxies and Tor to connect numerous drones to an IRC server and use them to flood various people and channels.
Membership
GNAA encourages people to join by suggesting that potential recruits watch the 1992 Danish low-budget film 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 upward moderation of 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 block which their members use whenever they perform a crapflood or post a news release. The full "sig", which includes an embedded ASCII art picture depicting 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!"
All the members of the GNAA act anonymously, though some pseudonyms have become known. One of the most oft-mentioned members in the GNAA is "Gary Niger", a play on the words "Gay Nigger". Gary, a fictional character coined by GNAA vice-president jesuitx, is cited as a press contact in most press releases the GNAA releases, and also frequently appears as the name in their trolling activities. Another member, "rolloffle", also known as "James A.C. Joyce", who has since left the GNAA, participated in many trolling incidents and created many scripts to cause problems for various software programs that are used in internet forums. "Rolloffle" was also the author of the article "Why your Movable Type blog must die", which was published on the website Kuro5hin. GNAA member "Rucas" is the lead developer of GNAA Last Measure and until recently hosted the largest Last Measure mirror at peoplesprimary.com. He has recently released latvianbotnet.pl, a Perl script to crapflood IRC channels. GNAA member "l0de" is the head technician and host of his Internet radio show, the l0de Radio Hour, popular with GNAA members, other internet trolls, and a small number of New Orleans residents.
Activities
Disruption
One of the aims of the GNAA is to cause disruption on the Internet. They tend to target community webboards and blogs, and have been moderately successful in disrupting both major and minor sites. They first 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 also registered many usernames en masse to mark a Slashdot editor who uses the name "michael" as their foe. 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. GNAA also causes disruption on IRC as they are known to crapflood channels. Because of this, many IRC servers will attempt to disallow the formation of a GNAA channel on their network (see counter-measures).
Notable trolls
I LOVE CAKE SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH
Pranking
The GNAA runs a conference call system which they use to troll various companies such as America Online. They produced several MP3 files, the most famous of which is "Punjabi Extreme" which combines excerpts from their various prank calls to America Online with the "Hey, everybody! I'm looking at gay porno!" sample from Last Measure, all set to an Indian beat.
Counter-measures
Because of the activities the GNAA performs online, various websites instituted methods in an effort to stop or curb the amount of trolling by the GNAA. Slashdot has a moderation system that is supposed to curb activities such as "First posting", and the website explains that first post comments are usually "one of those odd little memetic hiccups that come out of nowhere and run amok." Their system moderates these posts and downgrades them for being off topic and makes them almost unreadable. This Slashdot tool is key, since the GNAA often requires that a user perform a "first post" in order to join the GNAA. Slashdot and other websites also began to ban users for performing GNAA related acts or began to ban open proxy addresses to prevent spamming. Users at different forums also have made fun of the GNAA and their members and have mocked their activities. Slashdot has also called the GNAA, along with Trollkore and anti-slash.org, the "axis of abuse" in a parody of the axis of evil.
Some of the IRC networks affected by GNAA's presence have taken steps to make GNAA members aware of their aversion to the group. For instance, 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 (blocked) channels. Similarly, other IRC networks simply jupe #GNAA. Jodi Dean, Associate Professor of Political Science (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) in a presentation on blogging for a Cultural Studies Association meeting in Tucson, 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."
See also
References
- ^ GNAA About page and signature block. Accessed September 2, 2006.
- Apple Bets Farm on Heterosexual Computing - GNAA Members Offended
- GNAA Announces OneNigger Suite of Collaborative Trolling Utilities
- GNAA corporate homepage
- GNAA press release concerning AIMGirl
- Trollforge, a collection of crapflood scripts by various GNAA members
- Slashdot – Editor Michael's "freaks list" – Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for x86 Leaked? (June 12 2005)
- Xanga, The Ghetto Botnet, December 30 2004.
- You Have Been Trolled, October 7 2005.
- Extreme humor, June 14 2005.
- I cite: Blogging Theory, April 24 2005. Jodi's presentation can be found here.
External links
- Official Website - "GNAA corporate homepage" (Warning: Some of the links on this site can cause undesirable scripts to run, specifically the "members" link, which leads to a well-known Last Measure mirror.)
- "GNAUK corporate homepage" GNAA's United Kingdom Branch
- Gayniggers from Outer Space at IMDb
- "James A. C. Joyce" (February 3 2004). Why your Movable Type blog must die. Kuro5hin.org.
- Article in The Scotsman that refers to the GNAA
- GNAA Media Archive, include various image, audio and video files