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4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, 4chan hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, music, literature, fitness, politics, and sports, among others.Registration is not possible, and the site's users generally post anonymously; threads receiving recent replies are "bumped" to the top of their respective board and old threads are automatically deleted as new ones are created. As of June 2020, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, with approximately 900,000 posts made daily.The site was created as a counterpart to the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, also known as 2chan,and the first boards were created for posting images and discussion related to anime. 4chan has been described as a hub of Internet subculture, with 4chan's community being influential in the formation and spread of prominent Internet memes, including lolcats, Rickrolling, and rage comics, as well as activist and political movements, such as Anonymous and the alt-right.4chan has often been the subject of media attention as a source of numerous controversies, including the coordination of pranks, harassment, attacks against other websites and Internet users and the posting of illegal content, threats of violence, misogyny and racism. The Guardian once summarized the 4chan community as "lunatic, juvenile ... brilliant, ridiculous and alarming".BackgroundChristopher Poole, 4chan's founder, at XOXO Festival in 2012The majority of posting on 4chan takes place on imageboards, where users have the ability to share images and create threaded discussions.The site's homepage lists 70 imageboards and one Flash animation board, divided into seven categories: Japanese Culture, Video Games, Interests, Creative, Other, Misc. (NSFW), and Adult (NSFW). Each board has its own set of rules and is dedicated to a specific topic, variously including anime and manga, video games, music, literature, fitness, politics, and sports, among others. As of 2019, the /pol/ (Politically Incorrect), /v/ (Video Games), /vg/ (Video Games Generals), and /b/ (Random) boards receive the most daily posts.4chan is the Internet's most trafficked imageboard, according to the Los Angeles Times.4chan's Alexa rank is 1042 as of June 2020 though it has been as high as 56.It is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth; as a result, its financing has often been problematic. Poole has acknowledged that donations alone could not keep the site online, and turned to advertising to help make ends meet.However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site's content.In January 2009, Poole signed a new deal with an advertising company; in February 2009, he was $20,000 in debt, and the site was continuing to lose money.The 4chan servers were moved from Texas to California in August 2008, which upgraded the maximum bandwidth throughput of 4chan from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s.Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously.Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as "Anonymous" or "moot".In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcodes as an optional form of authenticating a poster's identity.As making a post without filling in the "Name" field causes posts to be attributed to "Anonymous", general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users.Moderators generally post without a name even when performing sysop actions. A "capcode" may be used to attribute the post to "Anonymous ## Mod", although moderators often post without the capcode.In a 2011 interview on Nico Nico Douga, Poole explained that there are approximately 20 volunteer moderators active on 4chan.4chan also has a junior moderation team, called "janitors", who may delete posts or images and suggest that the normal moderation team ban a user, but who cannot post with a capcode. Revealing oneself as a janitor is grounds for immediate dismissal.4chan has been the target of occasional denial of service attacks. For instance, on December 28, 2010, 4chan and other websites went down due to such an attack, following which Poole said on his blog, "We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.—an exclusive club!"HistoryThe site was launched as http://4chan.net on October 1, 2003 by Christopher Poole, a then-15-year-old student from New York City using the online handle "moot".Poole had been a regular participant on the Something Awful subforum "Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse", where many users were familiar with the Japanese imageboard format and Futaba Channel ("双葉ちゃん♪").When creating 4chan, Poole obtained Futaba Channel's open source code and translated the Japanese text into English using AltaVista's Babel Fish online translator.After the site's creation, Poole invited users from the ADTRW subforum, many of whom were dissatisfied with the site's moderation, to visit 4chan, which he advertised as an English-language counterpart to Futaba Channel and a place for Western fans to discuss anime and manga.At its founding, the site only hosted one board: /b/ (Anime/Random).Before the end of 2003, several new anime-related boards were added, including /h/ (Hentai), /c/ (Anime/Cute), /d/ (Hentai/Alternative), /w/ (Wallpapers/Anime), /y/ (Yaoi), and /a/ (Anime). Additionally, a lolicon board was created at /l/ (Lolikon),but was disabled following the posting of genuine child pornography and ultimately deleted in October 2004, after threats of legal action.In February 2004, GoDaddy suspended the http://4chan.net domain, prompting Poole to move the site to its current domain at 4chan. On March 1, 2004, Poole announced that he lacked the funds to pay the month's server bill, but was able to continue operations after receiving a swarm of donations from users.In June 2004, 4chan experienced six weeks of downtime after Paypal suspended 4chan's donations service after receiving complaints about the site's content.Following 4chan's return, several non-anime related boards were introduced, including /k/ (Weapons), /o/ (Auto), and /v/ (Video Games).In 2008, nine new boards were created, including the sports board at /sp/, the fashion board at /fa/ and the "Japan/General" (the name later changed to "Otaku Culture") board at /jp/.In January 2011, Poole announced the deletion of the /r9k/ ("ROBOT9000") and /new/ (News) boards, saying that /new/ had become devoted to racist discussions, and /r9k/ no longer served its original purpose of being a test implementation of xkcd's ROBOT9000 script. During the same year, the /soc/ board was created in an effort to reduce the number of socialization threads on /b/. /r9k/ was restored on October 23, 2011, along with /hc/ ("Hardcore", previously deleted), /pol/ (a rebranding of /new/) and the new /diy/ board, in addition to an apology by Poole where he recalls how he criticized the deletion of Encyclopedia Dramatica and realized that he had done the same.In 2010, 4chan had implemented reCAPTCHA in an effort to thwart spam arising from JavaScript worms. By November 2011, 4chan made the transition to utilizing Cloudflare following a series of DDoS attacks. The 4chan imageboards were rewritten in valid HTML5/CSS3 in May 2012 in an effort to improve client-side performance.On September 28, 2012, 4chan introduced a "4chan pass"that, when purchased, "allows users to bypass typing a reCAPTCHA verification when posting and reporting posts on the 4chan image boards"; the money raised from the passes will go towards supporting the site.Hiroyuki Nishimura, the owner of 4chan since 2015On January 21, 2015, Poole stepped down as the site's administrator, citing stress from controversies such as Gamergate as the reason for his departure.On September 21, 2015, Poole announced that Hiroyuki Nishimura had purchased from him the ownership rights to 4chan, without disclosing the terms of the acquisition.Nishimura was the former administrator of 2channel between 1999 and 2014, the website forming the basis for anonymous posting culture which influenced later websites such as Futaba Channel and 4chan;Nishimura lost 2channel's domain after it was seized by his registrar, ex-US Army officerJim Watkins,after the latter alleged financial difficulties.In October 2016, it was reported that the site was facing financial difficulties that could lead to its closure or radical changes.In a post titled "Winter is Coming", Hiroyuki Nishimura said, "We had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed. I am sincerely sorry", citing server costs, infrastructure costs, and network fees.On November 17, 2018, it was announced that the site would be split into two, with the work-safe boards moved to a new domain, 4chan, while the NSFW boards would remain on the 4chan domain. In a series of posts on the topic, Nishimura explained that the split was due to 4chan being blacklisted by most advertising companies, and that the new 4channel domain would allow for the site to receive advertisements by mainstream ad providers.Christopher PoolePoole kept his real-life identity hidden until it was revealed on July 9, 2008, in The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, he had used the alias "moot".In April 2009, Poole was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine.The results were questioned even before the poll completed, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing were used to influence the vote.4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely, when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME."On September 12, 2009, Poole gave a talk on why 4chan has a reputation as a "Meme Factory" at the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna, Austria, which was part of the Paraflows 09 festival, themed Urban Hacking. In this talk, Poole mainly attributed this to the anonymous system, and to the lack of data retention on the site ("The site has no memory.").In April 2010, Poole gave evidence in the trial United States of America v. David Kernell as a government witness.As a witness, he explained the terminology used on 4chan to the prosecutor, ranging from "OP" to "lurker". He also explained to the court the nature of the data given to the FBI as part of the search warrant, including how users can be uniquely identified from site audit logs.Notable imageboards/pol/Main article: /pol//pol/ ("Politically Incorrect") is 4chan's political discussion board. A stickied thread on its front page states that the board's intended purpose is "discussion of news, world events, political issues, and other related topics."/pol/ was created in October 2011 as a rebranding of 4chan's news board, /new/,which was deleted that January for a high volume of racist discussion.Media sources have characterized /pol/ as predominantly racist and sexist, with many of its posts taking an explicitly neo-Nazi bent.The Southern Poverty Law Center regards /pol/'s rhetorical style as widely emulated by white supremacist websites such as The Daily Stormer; the Stormer's editor, Andrew Anglin, concurred./pol/ was where screenshots of Trayvon Martin's hacked social media accounts were initially posted.The board's users have started antifeminist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-Arab Twitter campaigns.Many /pol/ users favored Donald Trump during his 2016 United States presidential campaign. Both Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., appeared to acknowledge the support by tweeting /pol/-associated memes. Upon his successful election, a /pol/ moderator embedded a pro-Trump video at the top of all of the board's pages./b/Main article: /b/The "random" board, /b/, follows the design of Futaba Channel's Nijiura board. It was the first board created, and was described in 2009 as 4chan's most popular board, accounting for 30% of site traffic at the time.Gawker's Nick Douglas summarized /b/ as a board where "people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other."/b/ has a "no rules" policy, except for bans on certain illegal content, such as child pornography, invasions of other websites (posting floods of disruptive content), and under-18 viewing, all of which are inherited from site-wide rules. The "no invasions" rule was added in late 2006, after /b/ users spent most of the summer "invading" Habbo Hotel. The "no rules" policy also applies to actions of administrators and moderators, which means that users may be banned at any time, for any reason, including no reason at all.Due partially to its anonymous nature, board moderation is not always successful—indeed, the site's anti-child pornography rule is a subject of jokes on /b/. Christopher Poole told The New York Times, in a discussion on the moderation of /b/, that "the power lies in the community to dictate its own standards" and that site staff simply provided a framework.The humor of /b/'s many users, who refer to themselves as "/b/tards",is often incomprehensible to newcomers and outsiders, and is characterized by intricate inside jokes and dark comedy.Users often refer to each other, and much of the outside world, as fags.They are often referred to by outsiders as trolls, who regularly act with the intention of "doing it for the lulz", a corruption of "LOL" used to denote amusement at another's expense.The New York Observer has described posters as "immature pranksters whose bad behavior is encouraged by the site's total anonymity and the absence of an archive".Douglas said of the board, "reading /b/ will melt your brain", and cited Encyclopedia Dramatica's definition of /b/ as "the asshole of the Internets [sic]".Mattathias Schwartz of The New York Times likened /b/ to "a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line",while Baltimore City Paper wrote that "in the high school of the Internet, /b/ is the kid with a collection of butterfly knives and a locker full of porn."Wired describes /b/ as "notorious".Each post is assigned a post number. Certain post numbers are sought after with a large amount of posting taking place to "GET" them. A "GET" occurs when a post's number ends in a special number, such as 12345678, 22222222, or every millionth post.A sign of 4chan's scaling, according to Poole, was when GETs lost meaning due to the high post rate resulting in a GET occurring every few weeks. He estimated /b/'s post rate in July 2008 to be 150,000–200,000 posts per day.Internet cultureEarly internet memesMany early memes that originated at 4chan have gained media attention. This included "So I herd u liek mudkipz" [sic], which involved a phrase based on Pokémon and which generated numerous YouTube tribute videos, and the term "an hero" [sic] as a synonym for suicide, after a misspelling in the Myspace online memorial of seventh grader Mitchell Henderson.4chan and other websites, such as the satirical Encyclopedia Dramatica, have also contributed to the development of significant amounts of leetspeak.A lolcat image using the "I'm in ur..." formatA lolcat is an image combining a photograph of a cat with text intended to contribute humour. The text is often idiosyncratic and grammatically incorrect. In 2005, the meme was widely popularized by 4chan in the form of "Caturday". Every Saturday, users posted pictures of cats with image macros relating to that day's theme.In 2005, a meme known as the "duckroll" began, after Poole used a word filter to change "egg" to "duck" across 4chan. Thus, words such as "eggroll" were changed to "duckroll". This led to a bait-and-switch in which external links disguised as relevant to a discussion instead led to a picture of a duck on wheels.[90]An unidentified 4chan user applied the concept of the duckroll to a 2007 post relating to the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. In March of that year, the game's trailer had been released, and the game's immense popularity caused publisher Rockstar Games' website to crash. The user posted a YouTube link that purportedly led to the trailer, but in reality directed users to the music video for Rick Astley's 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up". Thus, the "rickroll" was born.In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Astley said he found the meme "bizarre and funny".A link to the YouTube video of Tay Zonday's song "Chocolate Rain" was posted on /b/ on July 11, 2007.The Age reported that 4chan posters urged each other to "swarm" the video on YouTube and thus increase its ranking.The video became an immensely popular Internet meme, resulting in cover versions by John Mayer and Green Day drummer Tré Cool.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.The character of Boxxy is portrayed by Catherine "Catie" Wayne, an American Internet celebrity known for her highly energetic vlogs.Her rise to exposure began in late 2008 and early 2009, surrounding self-made videos that were initially made to be posted to her Gaia Online profile.They then spread to 4chan and other sites, resulting in a large online following.In his American incarnation, Pedobear is an anthropomorphic bear child predator that is often used within the community to mock contributors showing a sexual interest in children.Pedobear is one of the most popular memes on non-English imageboards, and has gained recognition across Europe. In February 2010, a photoshopped version of Pedobear appeared along with mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics in an article on the games in Gazeta Olsztyńska, a Polish newspaper. This was done accidentally; due to the image being used from Google Images, the authors were unaware of the joke.Similarly, the Dutch television guide Avrobodeused one of the images. It has been used as a symbol of pedophilia by Maltese graffiti vandals prior to a papal visit.Anonymous and anti-Scientology activismProtests against ScientologySee also: Anonymous (group) and Project Chanology4chan has been labeled as the starting point of the Anonymous meme by The Baltimore City Paper,due to the norm of posts signed with the "Anonymous" moniker. The National Post's David George-Cosh said it has been "widely reported" that Anonymous is associated with 4chan and 711chan, as well as numerous Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels.Through its association with Anonymous, 4chan has become associated with Project Chanology, a worldwide protest against the Church of Scientology held by members of Anonymous. On January 15, 2008, a 4chan user posted to /b/, suggesting participants "do something big" against the Church of Scientology's website. This message resulted in the Church receiving threatening phone calls. It quickly grew into a large real-world protest. Unlike previous Anonymous attacks, this action was characterized by 4chan memes including rickrolls and Guy Fawkes masks. The raid drew criticism from some 4chan users who felt it would bring the site undesirable attention.My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandomThe adult fandom and subculture dedicated to the children's animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic began on the "Comics & Cartoons" (/co/) board of 4chan. The show was first discussed with some interest around its debut in October 2010.In an article published on the animation website Cartoon Brew, titled The End of the Creator-Driven Era in TV Animation, the writer Amid Amidi referenced the then-recent debut of the show as an example of how the talent of creators such as Lauren Faust was being used to work on behalf of an established toy-centric property rather than original ideas developed by creators themselves.The article was shared on /co/, where the alarmist tone of the essay provoked heightened interest in the show, resulting in praise for its plot, characters, and animation style.The moderation of My Little Pony related topics on 4chan became controversial; discussion of the show extended to the /b/ board, reaching a volume and intrusiveness that was eventually met with hostile reactions from other 4chan users. This resulted in intervention from a moderator, with an introduction of automatic one day ban on the use of the word "pony", to prevent discussion of the show. Discussion of the show began to spread to communities external to 4chan in reaction, including the establishment of the fan news website Equestria Daily, causing the show to reach a wider audience across the internet. These events were described as a "civil war" internal to 4chan.The site administrator moot eventually settled the matter by creating the board dedicated to discussion of the show, "Pony" (/mlp/), and apologised on behalf of the moderation team for neglecting "one of the largest subcultures in 4chan's history".There is a ban on discussion of the show globally on the site outside of this board.