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Another important difference between the evolving social media and 4chan was that while social media tended toward archiving a record of communication between users, 4chan boards had no retention and an absolute limit on the total number of posts. So, if a 4chan board was full at, say, one hundred posts, the next post would knock the last one into digital oblivion. On most boards, comments might last a few hours, but on 4chan's most popular board, known as “random” or /b/, posts might fall off within fifteen minutes.7
4chan's lack of memory was cost-saving, but it also changed the way people posted. On 4chan, said moot, if you post something and it's useless, “it's washed away.”8 The lolcats, rickrolling, and the other strange but infectious creations passed around the internet, known as memes, were born in this frantic environment. And because its best-known content came from /b/, “4chan” was often used as shorthand for its fastest moving board.
Absolute anonymity was also central to 4chan's appeal. Unlike social media, 4chan users didn't need to create accounts, pseudonyms or even log in. As a result, around 90 percent of them posted as “anonymous,” a practice so central to the 4chan culture that users were known simply as “anons.” According to Poole, eliminating the requirement of any kind of online identity provided anons with freedom. On the comment streams of most websites, he claimed, longtime users were often accorded the undeserved respect reserved for elders. Likewise, if a new user's first posts were considered unfunny, useless, or lame, their pseudonym would forever be associated with failure. Absolute anonymity unburdened 4chan-ers from the weight of identity while encouraging absolute freedom of speech. Poole figured that if 4chan was a place for cost-free failure, it would also be a place for limitless creativity. He seemed to be right. In 2008, The Guardian called 4chan “brilliant, ridiculous and alarming.”9
What was absolutely certain was that 4chan—with its low-budget interface, self-identified outsider status, anonymity, and disdain for connecting with people offline—was the anti-Facebook. Social media was a platform where people willingly fused their offline and online identities; 4chan was a dark hole where anons joined a chaotic hive mind. In psychoanalytic terms, if social media's transparency made it the internet's superego, then the cloaked operations on 4chan were its id: A place for instinctive, repressed, and, often, antisocial desires.
The dark side of 4chan-style pranks was examined in an August 2008 New York Times Magazine piece about trolling. The term “troll” had been used since the late 1980s to describe a person who tried to get a rise out of someone else online. Trolls might, for example, make a stupid or offensive comment just to test the outcome from others online. And, as with prank phone calls, the best targets are people who take the caller seriously or get upset. Unlike phone calls, however, the incensed or floundering victim may quickly attract other online trolls in a feeding frenzy that finishes only when all the laughs have been gobbled up. Like in the fairytales, trolls can be very ugly.
In the expanding and anonymous space of the internet, trolling had already claimed at least one high-profile victim, a girl who committed suicide after being pranked and harassed via Myspace. The trolling had nothing to do with 4chan users; the girl's friend's mother orchestrated it. However, it prompted reporter Mattathias Schwartz to spend time with several established trolls. One young man, a Seattle-area based troll who shared his apartment with Schwartz for a few days, lived his days unexceptionally, going to work, Subway, coffee shops, and meeting his friends at a sushi restaurant. He would happily pass unnoticed on the street. Another, named weev, was more flamboyant, outwardly racist, and anti-Semitic.
Ultimately, though, Schwartz predicted that trolls would not be a real problem for the rapidly growing web. “It may not be a bad thing,” he mused, “that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural.” He was right on one count. Over the next few years, trolling would not limit the internet's growth. But trolls and the 4chan culture they represented would soon bust out of their “ghetto” and run amuck in the real world.
In January 2008, a leaked video of actor and Scientologist Tom Cruise was briefly posted on YouTube. The interview, which was edited down from a three-hour Scientology-produced promotional video, shows Cruise speaking in delusional terms about the religion. His most famous quote describes how Scientologists were “the only ones who could help” people injured in car accidents. As they had for decades, the religion's lawyers aggressively leaped into action, quickly forcing YouTube to take down the video.
But this time, the internet fought back. The website Gawker obtained a copy of the video, reposted it, and, as news of Scientology's clumsy attempt at censorship spread, the Cruise interview went viral.
For many 4chan users, the opportunity to ridicule a Hollywood icon and push back on attempted censorship by a shadowy religion deserved special attention. Anons invented a mock religion called “Chanology” and created a separate board for planning retribution against the church.
In a video posted January 21, 2008, Operation Chanology announced itself in style. Images of grey clouds sped across an apocalyptic sky while a robotic voice intoned “Hello, Leaders of Scientology, we are Anonymous.” After reciting a list of crimes, including “suppression of dissent,” the voice declared: “Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed.” The video ended with the over-the-top warning, “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
It was funny and compelling; everyone wanted to know what would come next. Anonymous had previous experience with various online pranks, so they began this much larger operation with similar techniques. They attacked Scientology websites, forcing them down repeatedly over several weeks. Secret church documents were stolen and distributed online. Local Scientology offices were overwhelmed by pages upon pages of black faxes, tying up phone lines, and drying up ink cartridges. A “Google bomb” gamed the search engine, making “Scientology” the first result for search terms “dangerous cult.” Previously, critics of the church had effectively been silenced by Scientology's aggressive tactics, legal and otherwise. But the church's leadership found targeting anonymous enemies much more difficult.
Relatively quickly, however, Operation Chanology moved past the tried and true tactics of technically skilled anons. Instead of just getting a few chuckles by besieging the church online, organizers shifted to offline political action. On February 10, 2008, a group of what appeared to be a few hundred overaged trick or treaters marched through the well-manicured streets of Clearwater, Florida—the controversial religion's training base. In front of one of the buildings, the crowd broke into chants of “Xenu! Xenu! Xenu!”—a galactic dictator whose existence in Scientology's esoteric cosmology is widely denied by church leaders.
Anonymous's masks, ill-fitting suits, bandanas, and sunglasses gave the event a festival atmosphere, but they were also practical. The balconies of multiple Scientology-owned buildings were lined with people scanning the crowd with cameras. By remaining anonymous while offline, the protestors hoped to avoid legal or other forms of retribution.
The Clearwater march, combined with organized protests outside dozens of churches worldwide, gave some of the lulz-seekers a taste of social justice. It turned the 4chan-linked Anonymous group into the world's first high-profile hacktivists. Since then, Anonymous has gone to provide communication support for Iranians during the 2009 election protests and supplies to homeless around the world.
The secretive group has also often engaged in doxing, a term that developed from publicizing private “docs” or documents. Doxing victims would often see their phone numbers, emails, addresses, photos, and other information widely released on the internet, potentially as an invitation for harassment or worse. In one case, Anonymous hacked a Ku Klux Klan website and claimed to unmask one thousand alleged members. Doxing is a bit like frontier justice, though. It isn't always accurate and there is no court of appeal. Some people were e
rroneously accused of Klan membership but, once “convicted” online, there was no easy means to clear their names.
Doxing also wasn't new. The practice, if not the name, had been used by anti-abortion extremists two decades earlier. In these incidents, groups had used the internet to widely distribute abortion providers’ phone numbers, addresses, photos, and so on. The web page, decorated with images of blood, was clearly a cyber hit list. When a provider was wounded, their name turned gray. If they were killed, their name was crossed out. These digital lists were terrifying, even if they focused on a relatively small number of people.
As Anonymous's activities grew, some charitable, some progressive, some viciously retaliatory, so did questions about their legality. But it was the group's commitment to social justice that offended some of their fellow 4chan-ers. Many anons were steadfast that the primary goal of online activity was to get lulz. But their preference was often for humor that was itself cynical and vicious.
South Park, a TV show that began appearing regularly on Comedy Central in 1997, was a cartoon animated in a particularly primitive cutout style, much like 4chan's almost premodern layout. The cartoon follows the adventures of four elementary school kids, but it is known for its profanity and dark humor. It was not intended for kids but relied on everything from relentless scatological references to endless racist slurs to an irreverent portrayal of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and even mocked Scientology.
One of the main characters was also vehemently anti-Semitic, frequently attacking another main character, who was Jewish. Their relationship was played for laughs, albeit uncomfortable ones. And, though its creators have rejected all political labels, the show's relentless attacks on liberal shibboleths made it popular with “South Park conservatives,” people who resented what they perceive as enforcement of “politically correct” speech and action.
Also first appearing in the late 1990s, Vice magazine prided itself for its profane attacks on hipster sensibilities, a dark, cruel humor premised on a perhaps ironic but very aggressive reaction to politically correct norms. Its “Dos and Don'ts” section mercilessly criticized the appearance and fashion of Manhattan pedestrians. The magazine was called infantile and “characterized by lewd masculinity”10—but was also incredibly popular, eventually becoming a media empire.
Around 2008, Vice magazine underwent an internal civil war between those who wanted to do more serious journalism and those who wanted to retain the magazine's original focus on brutal, sarcastic humor, much like 4chan's rift after Anonymous's drift into social justice. As a result of this split, Gavin McInnes, one of three co-editors and the one most dedicated to assaults on sensibilities, left the magazine—eventually reemerging as the head of the right-wing extremist Proud Boys.
On 4chan, the comedic legacy of South Park and Vice combined with an absolute commitment to free speech, The result, perhaps not surprisingly, was innumerable racist, anti-Semitic, and, especially, misogynist posts. In their efforts to push boundaries, anons often also fixated on Nazi imagery. 4chan users once swarmed an online children's game with swastikas.11 On another occasion, anons hacked Google, positioning symbols depicting a swastika, planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the words “[f---] you google” on the search engine's trends list.12 However, this hateful imagery was almost always wrapped in impenetrable self-referential humor and a slippery irony.
4chan wasn't given a free pass by the media. It was called both a “meme factory” and, later, the “Internet Hate Machine,” but it still remained extremely hard to tell truth from fiction from prank. Despite all the jokey hate on the site, and Anonymous's occasional hacktivism, in 2009, 4chan still seemed too chaotic, gross, and insular a place to support any widespread sustained politics. Over the next seven years, though, 4chan's trollish culture shifted politically rightward and became a locus for a uniquely dangerous new kind of extremism.
The first, terrifying glimpse at 4chan-style politics began in 2013. In February, a developer working under the name Zoë Quinn released a video game called Depression Quest. It was not heroic journey, single-shooter, or any of the usual gaming genres. Quinn, who had long suffered from depression, wanted to create an educational, immersive experience that helped people realize and talk about their mental health. Along with the game's sobering subject, it had a unique format. Players were regularly confronted by passages that added up to a book-length amount of text. All gameplay decisions were made in a despondent haze.
Quinn's game received some good reviews, but also scathing criticism from gamers furious that she had departed from skill and violence-based entertainment. There was a shared ethos and membership between the 4chan and gamer communities: both were defensive of their territory and, all too often, virulently misogynist. Gamers were outraged that Quinn—an avid gamer herself—had, as they saw it, invaded the boys’ club and asked them to talk about their feelings.
While the initial response to Depression Quest was ugly, the episode soon ignited into a much more vicious melodrama. In a blog written months after Depression Quest's release, Quinn's former boyfriend attacked her, implying that she had only received a favorable review because of a sexual relationship with a writer at the gaming website Kotaku. The reviewer in question quickly responded by pointing out that he had never reviewed the game. Quinn's boyfriend later corrected his post.
By this time, however, the reputed scandal had made it to 4chan, where it prompted outrage, acrimony, and a fresh wave of attacks on Quinn. Her social media accounts were hacked, and she was doxed, with her phone number, home address, and personal information widely published on the internet. Her family members’ details were also published, and a caller told Quinn's father she was a “whore.” Several nude photos of her were circulated online. In August of 2014, after multiple death threats, Quinn fled her house to stay with friends.
Quinn was not the only victim. Multiple people came to Quinn's defense, including video game developers Phil Fish and Brianna Wu, and feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian. All were mocked as overly earnest SJWs (Social Justice Warriors), doxed, and, in some cases, were victims of attempted “swatting”—fake calls to emergency services designed to get a SWAT team to respond to victim's address. Fish ended up selling his company, while Wu also fled her home for a while.
The actor Adam Baldwin contributed the snappy hashtag #gamergate to refer to the supposed evidence that the gaming industry was nontransparent and had a left-wing bias. The hashtag successfully spread the outrage on social media, although its logic was suspect. If the outcry was intended to force gaming reviewers into more transparency, the attacks should have been leveled at writers and online gaming publications. Instead, the vast majority of the abuse was targeted at Quinn and her supporters, particularly women.
While the Arab Spring and, for many, the protests against Scientology showed the liberating potential of huge, networked groups of anonymous individuals organizing against despots and speaking truth to power, Gamergate very clearly exposed the dangers.
For one, Gamergate was impossible without anonymity. One of the victims of the attacks, developer Brianna Wu, fled her house after having her personal information revealed and receiving thousands of threats. But Wu then turned the tables. She posted an $11,000 bounty for personal information about her doxers so they could be prosecuted. In effect, she threatened to dox the doxers. For her attackers, even the mere threat of losing their anonymity and facing some sort of consequences was too much. Wu claimed that as soon as the bounty was announced, the “rape and death threats instantly stopped.”13
The immediate cessation of attacks also suggested something else: the rabid attacks weren't based on an ideological commitment to “transparency in the gaming industry,” but more like an exercise in abusing the boundaries of anonymity. Compare, for example, the reaction of the countless suddenly silent Gamergate trolls with the original doxers: anti-abortion extremists and their provider hit list.
The FBI eventually discovered the existenc
e of the hit list and identity of some of its contributors. As a result, the extremists viewing and contributing to the list knew that their identities were vulnerable. But the threat to doctors did not stop. Anonymity was preferable for these extremists but, for the most deeply radicalized, it was not essential to continuing their participation. Many were firmly and violently committed to ending abortion in America.
Anonymity had also made hate sites like Stormfront popular with white supremacists. Unless they chose otherwise, all the site's users were cyphers, even harder to identify than a hooded Klansman. Without worrying about any consequences, they were free to discuss things that they perceived as prohibited in the offline world. As one neo-Nazi said, “The Internet provides a core feeling of freedom…to live out one's own ideology…without the danger of facing social resistance or exclusion.”14
However, the perception of existing in a space where there are no boundaries or consequences encourages some people to go beyond simply expressing themselves. On 4chan, anons would try to get laughs from an unlimited number of people by creating offensive images that they might even not show to their best friends offline. Likewise, some neo-Nazis reported that approaching the world from behind a screen didn't just make some of their comrades comfortable, it made them outright aggressive. As one interviewee explained, “Some are very shy or introverted in real life but online they are pure agitators.” As a result, they “run riot, placing swastikas wherever they can.”15
A University of Queensland psychological study added another wrinkle to Gamergate phenomenon. While anonymity can enhance abusive behavior, the study found, the abuse is actually rooted in group dynamics. In 2008, New York Times reporter Mattathias Schwartz imagined a ghetto in which the trolls were safely contained. By 2015, 4chan had 20 million unique visitors a month, making it one of the most trafficked websites ever.16 The ghetto was spilling into the streets, their trollish behavior was spreading, and their huge numbers exacerbated the abusive group dynamics.