What is 4chan? 1

Recently, 4chan was the all over the news in one of the most controversial hacking activity that took place in the last few years bought. People criticized it as the images first surfaced on this site. Websites, Newspapers went on a rampage to degrade its reputation. After a few weeks a threat emerged of hacking the U.N. Women’s Brand Ambassador and Harry Potter actress Emma Watson by a 4chan hacker. But what is this 4chan, and why is it always in the midst of controversies?

What is 4chan?

4chan is only an image sharing board, a place where people come and share images and other stuffs. Then why is it famous? Well in 4chan, you can post anything being Anonymous. That means you don’t have to show yourself. You can post and comment as anonymous. No one will ever know it was you. To take advantage of the anonymity feature 4chan provides, images of celebrities were leaked only on 4chan. 4chan is basically the hub of internet activists and other people. 4chan today has 218,000 visitors daily, 6.8 million visitors per month with 7.8 million page views everyday and 240.6 million views every month.

History of 4chan

In 2003, a 15-year-old teenage guy started 4chan in his room. He went by a pseudo name of ‘moot. He later came out with his real name Christopher Poole. Christopher started 4chan to discuss Japanese comics and cartoons commonly known as Anime. There was already a Japanese board 2chan. The idea of an American website where people can post and share images anonymously motivated Christopher, and he managed to get the source code of 2chan and converted Japanese to English using an online translator. Since he intended to only share Anime, there were only two boards at the time of its creation, ‘/a/ Anime general’ and ‘/b/ Anime random’. Overtime, many new boards were added and ‘/b/’ was renamed to ‘Random’. Today there are 6 boards and around 48 forums.

How to use 4chan?

4chan uses boards and forums to let people communicate anonymously.The first letter is used to abbreviate the forums, like ‘/a/‘ stands for ‘Anime & Manage‘ , ‘/c/‘ stands for ‘Anime Cute‘, ‘/v/‘ for ‘Video games‘ and ‘/sp/‘ stands for ‘Sports’.  Everything that is under these forums is anonymous. 4chan never keeps archive which is why all the data that you see today will disappear after few days.

There is no need to register. You can post with any name or Anonymously. There is no filter or age restriction on posts. Everything you see there is shared by various users, usually anonymously or with an alias. Like every other website, 4chan has its advantages and disadvantages. Since there is no age-restriction or filter, you can come across some stuffs that can literally freak you out. The ‘/b/‘ board or Random board is infamous for the same. Some call it the darkest place on the internet, while some will advice you to avoid it altogether. Stuffs that don’t have any category end up on ‘/b/’ and it isn’t a place you should visit.

Main page of 4chan.org

Internet Memes!

Internet memes originated on 4chan. People started sharing cat pictures with some text on it and it later went on to be one of the most viral memes named ‘LOLcats’.

LOLcat

In 2005 Christopher used a filter to change the keyword ‘egg’ to ‘duck’ on all the posts present on 4chan. Words like ‘eggroll’ changed to ‘duckroll’, and people started redirecting important and relevant discussions to a picture of duck on wheels.

duckroll meme

In 2007, an anonymous user posted a link to Tay Zonday’s song “Chocolate Rain” and urged others to share and increase its ranking on YouTube. The video became an instant hit, one of the first videos that went viral on YouTube and later became a popular meme. Today it has over 100 million views. Here’s the original video:

John Mayer and Green Day drummer Tré Cool also created a cover version of this song.

Controversies!

4chan has always been in the center of many internet controversies.

1. Back in 2008, during the Presidential Election in U.S.A, a user hacked politician Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email account and displayed all her emails on ‘/b/‘ forum. The hacker was later arrested and found guilty. He was convicted to one year plus a day in federal custody, followed by three years of supervised release.
2. Few years back, an embarrassing video of Tom Cruise was shared on YouTube. The Church of Scientology department forced Internet giants YouTube to remove that video. That step didn’t went well with the users of 4chan, who wanted a free internet. They protested in thousands using a mask, all users on 4chan were familiar with. That little protest created an online Internet Hacktivists group Anonymous, which fights for uncensored free internet.
   

   Anonymous Internet Activists protesting free internet

3. An anon user posted pics of him harnessing his cat. Anonymous found the user and posted his details withing 24 hours and he was later arrested in 48 hours.
4. In 2008, an anonymous user submitted a hoax story claiming Steve Jobs had suffered a major heart-attack to CNN’s user-generated news site, that led to  falling of Apple’s stock prices.
5. TIME’s top 100 list nominated Christopher a.k.a. ‘moot’. 4chan stepped in to bring him on the top! They also manipulated the list to send a secret message.
   

   Christopher tops the list, thanks to 4chan users!

6. In 2010, a Bollywood film industry hired Airplex software to attack the famous torrent site The Pirate Bay. Anonymous hacktivists launched a subsequent attack dubbed Operation Payback, attacking the website of the Motion Picture Association of America and the
   Recording Industry Association of America.
7. 4chan was also in news few months back in August 2014, when private pictures of various A grade Hollywood celebrities were released on 4chan.
8. Following the Celebrities scandal, after Emma Watson’s inspiring #HeForShe speech at the United Nations, a marketing company Rantic, released a hoax to hack Emma Watson’s account and identified itself as a hacker from 4chan. Rantic was against 4chan and wanted to it shut down using bad publicity and hated from the internet users. However, Anonymous attacked Rantic immediately for using Emma Watson’s name for their own publicity and bought down Rantic.com. Rantic later apologized for their mistake.

So if you want to post something, want yourself to be heard, go on 4chan and express your views.