The leaked images of female celebrities in varying states of undress have brought renewed attention to the platform on which the pictures were first posted: 4chan.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the venerable imageboard and how it works, including a rather embarrassing mishap on CNN yesterday, when their “Technology Analyst,” Brett Larson, thought that the site was a person.
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This isn’t the first time that the website has been charged as an instigator in some giant scandal or the focus of media hype; but mentions of the 11-year old site on television or in print are often accompanied by a confused frown or a dismissive tone, as if a site that attracts some 20 million visitors a month, created one of the most famous hacktivist groups and has been responsible for a bevy of online atrocities is barely worth mentioning.
Here are the facts about 4chan you need to know:
What Exactly Is 4chan?
4chan is, at its heart, a message board forum, similar in some ways to Reddit, or the average bulletin board or even a Disqus comment chain. It does, however, differ in two very distinct ways: First, to start any new topic, users are required to post an image — whether it’s related or not to the subject of their post — and using images to underscore a point in your post is encouraged. Second, there's no sorting or downvoting or filtering. Posts and replies are viewable raw and in real time, with deletion typically occurring only in cases of illegal content.
The site is a breeding ground for memes, and references, and in-jokes, all knitted together into a strange language topped with a thick dollop of dark humor that renders it almost incomprehensible to newcomers. Ethnic and sexual slurs are bandied about like friendly greetings; death threats are both made and shrugged off with the same degree of nonchalance; and virus-laden links hide around every corner.
How Did 4chan Start?
While it definitely isn’t older than the Internet, it’s been around for a while. 4chan is based on an older Japanese website, Futaba Channel (or 2chan), where anime enthusiasts and other nerds still geek out over manga and cartoons, and engage in general chitchat. Most conversations occurred in Japanese.
In 2003, after realizing that there was no western equivalent for his favorite imageboard, the then 15-year-old Christopher Poole, better known by the alias “moot,” created 4chan in his childhood bedroom. The design and culture were directly mirrored from Futaba Channel, and many of the site’s policies and traditions also stem from this predecessor.
What’s the Connection Between 4chan and Anonymous?
4chan is the birthplace of Anonymous, the online “hacktivist” collective that is responsible for both mass denial-of-service attacks and real life protests. Anonymous first gained popular recognition in 2008, as part of a protest against the Church of Scientology's censorship of videos and documents that portrayed the church in a negative light. The Anonymous protest campaign lasted over a year and spanned multiple countries. Anonymous is still active today, inflicting denial-of-service attacks on sites for organizations that the group sees as violating human rights. It also organizes and donates to disaster relief efforts. However, most (if not all) ties to 4chan have been severed, and it is now run as an independent outfit.
So What’s on 4chan?
Originally there were just two boards on 4chan: the /a/ board, which was exclusively for discussion of anime and manga, and the /b/ board, which was for everything else. The subforum that experienced a rapid explosion of traffic was the ‘Random’ board, which, as the name implies, allows any content across a broad spectrum of topics. Posts are all completely anonymous, and moderation is scant.
Now, even though the site has expanded to have 63 boards with content ranging from sports to fashion to fitness, the anarchic /b/ still makes up 30 percent of the site’s daily content, and is still the main catalyst for the site’s poor reputation.
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4chan’s inherent anonymity, and lack of data retention (threads are “bumped” down into the ether by newer threads) results in little accountability for those posting. The result? A ton of noise. Adult content and inside jokes collide amongst a torrent of insults and unsubstantiated claims. It’s raw, unfiltered chaos. The New York Times’ Mattathias Schwarz said it best, way back in 2008:
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
How Does 4chan Work?
The overall design of 4chan is for the most part unchanged since its birth in 2003, leading it to look somewhat dated and confusing to newcomers.
Any post that a user makes has to be accompanied with an image, the replies to which are allowed to be image-free. Site-wide rules bar explicitly illegal content and organized “invasions,” i.e. hacking attacks on other sites, but users are otherwise given nearly free rein. A set of local laws govern this particular online prairie with varying degrees of enforcement — rules like “Don’t talk about /b/,” or “/b/ is not your personal army,” referring to the act of intentionally siccing the site’s hive on a particular individual.
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Why Does 4chan Have a Reputation for Troublemaking?
Despite those rules, /b/ posters have been responsible for an untold number of hacking attacks and harassment cases, ranging from the mischievous and juvenile — calling GameStop branches en masse asking for copies of “Battletoads” (a long-discontinued Sega video game) — to the morally unconscionable, such as the hacking of Sarah Palin’s email account in 2008, to the downright sociopathic, like the twisted #cutforbieber campaign that sought to get fans of the pop singer to cut themselves.
Mischief aside, this rapidly swarming ball of human chaos remains notable for two reasons: One, for better or worse, it is the driving force for so much online culture. Memes that have exploded across the web often evolve from something that traces back to the imageboard. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it’s one of the last bastions of truly free expression on the web. In an age of Google usernames and public online personas, 4chan’s archaic forced anonymity leaves it as one of the last dive-y cantinas in an increasingly gentrified city.
However, just like that dive bar, we really can’t recommend that you go there.
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