4chan

Extracted Attributes

4chan

4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, including video games, television, literature, cooking, weapons, music, history, technology, anime, physical fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Registration is not available, except for staff, and users typically post anonymously. As of 2022, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of whom approximately half are from the United States. 4chan was created as an unofficial English-language counterpart to the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, also known as 2chan, and its first boards were originally used for posting images and discussion related to anime. The site has been described as a hub of Internet subculture, its community being influential in the formation and popularization of prominent Internet memes, such as lolcats, Rickrolling, rage comics, wojaks, Pepe the Frog, as well as hacktivist and political movements, such as Anonymous and the alt-right. 4chan has often been the subject of media attention as a source of controversies, including the coordination of pranks and harassment against websites and Internet users, and the posting of illegal and offensive content as a result of its lax censorship and moderation policies. In 2008, The Guardian summarized the 4chan community as "lunatic, juvenile [...] brilliant, ridiculous and alarming".

Web Search Results

• 4chan | Research Starters - EBSCO

  Research Starters Home EBSCO Knowledge Advantage TM # 4chan 4chan is an anonymous image-board website launched in 2003, originally intended for discussions about anime. It quickly evolved into a vast online community encompassing a diverse array of topics, including video games, politics, and sports. 4chan is notable for its minimal moderation and the anonymity it offers users, allowing for a free exchange of ideas but also enabling the proliferation of controversial and often offensive content. The site has given rise to various Internet memes and movements, while also becoming associated with negative aspects such as harassment and hate speech. [...] 4chan is an anonymous image-board website that was first launched in 2003. Originally created as a forum for posting images and discussion related to anime, 4chan quickly grew into one of the world’s largest online communities. Since its creation, 4chan has expanded to include numerous public boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics ranging from anime to video games, politics, sports, and more. In the process, 4chan emerged as a major hub of Internet subculture responsible for the creation and spread of various well-known Internet memes and online political movements. At the same time, however, 4chan has also earned a reputation for being one of the Internet’s most controversial websites. With minimal moderation and all but complete user anonymity, all sorts of questionable, if not [...] Essentially a series of freewheeling online forums where users can discuss a broad range of topics, in most respects 4chan is similar to other largescale Internet forums like Reddit or Something Awful. Like these other websites, 4chan is divided into separate boards that are dedicated to specific topics, such as politics, sports, and video games. However, several factors make 4chan unique among other Internet forums. Most importantly, 4chan users do not have to sign up for an account or even create a user name to comment. This affords 4chan users a much greater degree of anonymity and makes it easier for them to say or do nearly anything without fear of repercussions. Another key difference between 4chan and other Internet forums is that 4chan threads automatically expire after a set

• 4Chan - Wikipedia

  and called for a new wave of pornographic videos to be uploaded to YouTube on January 6, 2010. Later the same year, 4chan made numerous disruptive pranks directed at singer Justin Bieber. [...] A link to the YouTube video of Tay Zonday's song "Chocolate Rain" was posted on /b/ on July 11, 2007, and then subsequently circulated by users, becoming a very popular internet meme. 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 an oft-repeated meme on 4chan and inspired remixes. Fellow YouTuber Boxxy's popularity was also due in part to 4chan. [...] In 2023, a 38-year-old of Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, was arrested for threatening Volusia County, Florida, sheriff Mike Chitwood on 4chan due to Chitwood's condemnation of antisemitism. According to authorities, the poster, who lived 974 miles away from Volusia County, advocated "shoot[ing] Chitwood in the head and murder[ing] him" in a February 22 post. In April of that same year, two other 4chan users, residents of California and Connecticut respectively, were also arrested for threatening to kill Chitwood on 4chan.

• 4chan and 8chan (8kun) | Origins, Uses, Conspiracy Theories, Far ...

  4chan was created by teenage Internet entrepreneur Christopher Poole (under the username “moot”) in 2003. Poole had been a poster on Something Awful, one of the Internet’s most active and influential discussion forums. Something Awful was, however, heavily moderated, and its community discouraged memes. 4chan was founded, at least in part, to escape these restrictions, and it was built using the same code as the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel (also known as 2chan). Although it was created as a place to post sexually explicit anime images (a practice that had been banned on Something Awful), 4chan soon gained a reputation for its extremely lax moderation policies; practically all speech and content that was not explicitly against United States law was allowed. Its /b/ (“random”) board [...] 4chan and 8chan (8kun), imageboard websites that are characterized primarily by the anonymity of their users and their loosely moderated, sometimes graphic or extreme content. Imageboards allow participants to post text and photos and to host threaded conversations on topics as varied as music, movies, food, sports, video games, technology, religion, and politics. 4chan helped popularize the image macro, an image with superimposed text used for humorous effect, and it was the source for some of Internet culture’s most enduring memes. [...] 8chan was created in 2013 by Fredrick Brennan, a self-taught computer programmer. Brennan’s imageboard was similar to 4chan, but it gave users the ability to create their own topic boards; in this way, it integrated one of the most important capabilities of the social media platform Reddit. 8chan initially had only a handful of users, but it experienced an explosion in popularity in 2014 after 4chan banned any further discussion of Gamergate, a controversy ostensibly about ethics in video game journalism that was, in fact, a targeted harassment campaign against women in the video game industry. Gamergaters on 4chan’s /v/ (“video game”) board had “doxed” (revealed personal details with malicious intent) and even issued death and rape threats against several women. They had also carried out

• A quick history of 4chan and the rightists who killed it (guest post)

  When Christopher “Moot” Poole created 4chan, he sought to emulate the anonymous behavior of the Japanese website 2channel. Moot was a large browser of the website Something Awful, a web forum dedicated to making jokes and creating original content. Moot would bring Something Awful’s character to his soon to be popular website. He wanted 4chan to be more anonymous than the enthusiast forums of the past, by stripping away usernames and user accounts. 4chan was a great success, and was soon to represent everything Poole loved—anonymity, games, anime, and original content. [...] "4chan is super mean and right wing, can't they see how silly they're being lol, George Bush is to blame for Obongo's mistakes! Hillary 2016 lol!" 4chan is becoming political because politics has evolved beyond the lame bubble that was the 2000s wherein no politics actually fucking mattered A majority of Democrats voted for the bailouts and a majority of Republicans voted against them. That's the first seed in the rightward shift of America- why is the pro-rich party voting against free shit for the rich? [...] Unlike forums before it, 4chan didn’t set (many) limits to what was considered acceptable on the website. Forums like Neogaf.com have a very strict expectation for rule following, and will ban you for subtle things like posting in an incorrect tone. The lax rules of 4chan attracted a lot of content producers, and people who loved to post without the fear of gaining a bad reputation, or being banned for behaving a certain way. On 4chan you can be banned for being off-topic, but not for making racist posts.

• 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

  4chan’s value system, like Trump’s ideology, is obsessed with masculine competition (and the subsequent humiliation when the competition is lost). Note the terms 4chan invented, now so popular among grade schoolers everywhere: “fail” and “win”, “alpha” males and “beta cucks”. This system is defined by its childlike innocence, that is to say, the inventor’s inexperience with any sort of “IRL” romantic interaction. And like Trump, since these men wear their insecurities on their sleeve, they fling these insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else. [...] 4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “moot”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly. [...] The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

• Instance Of

  Q984179

• Inception Date

  10/1/2003