The power of imageboards: How 4chan became a hotbed of violence
kibertravlya from an unusual word finally turned at full scale problem. Pornomist, the publication of personal data, the stamping of offensive memes and the raids of anonymous accounts of victims have become daily occurrences that are traumatic for nothing more than persecution in real life.
Kibertravlya can develop under different scenarios, but anonymous forums like the English-speaking 4chan, Reddit, or the Russian “Dvacha” remain indisputably its outposts. Most of us treat image boards (anonymous forums) as something frivolous, parochial and even marginal. Indeed, according to statistics, 4chan has only 27 million visitors, while Facebook has reached an audience level of 2 billion, YouTube has reached 1.5 billion, and even Twitter has been losing its position of 328 million monthly active users.
It would seem that the platform, so much inferior to the giants, can not have much weight, but recent media studies confirm the opposite. It turned out that Twitter spreads more fake news than this, just because of imageboards. Such a conclusion was made by Western researchers, having studied several popular threads on Reddit and 4chan, dedicated to conspiracy and Donald Trump. That is, narrow image-based communities have much more power than we expected, and this is not only about politics.
Anonymous on 11/28/17 Tue 10:53:28
4chan are young men who often cannot openly admit their emotional problems for fear of social condemnation. For example, in the Russian-language "Dvache" you can read hundreds of stories about harassment at work, which anonymous authors share quite frankly.
Formally, there is a place on the forums for women. On request, in Google, "two feminism", the first link leads to a thread for women with their own FAQ and relatively strict moderation rules - it resembles the usual public "VKontakte." There are communities for women on Reddit and 4chan. True, one of the most active and big sredreditov r / BlackLadies (where women of African descent were discussing their problems) faced serious trouble after the murder of an African American teenager in American Ferguson. Numerous trolls flooded women with threats and insults, the moderators tried to figure it out on their own, but in the end they were forced to write an open letter to the forum management demanding to influence the situation - and that did not help. The victims of cyberbullying turned out to be women who told stories of sexual violence experienced in the r / rape subreddit (earlier fetishist porn was posted there, but the content of the activists changed the content).
Of course, in order to face harassment, it is not necessary to come to “Dvach”. The most famous story of harassment in the Russian-speaking Internet space was the situation when forum users used the FindFace application to track down personal data of pornoactresses. After that, they found girls in the VKontakte network and sent out porn photos of them to friends and relatives - as a result, several dozen girls were injured. One of the addressees was fired from the St. Petersburg gymnasium, where she worked as a teacher, the two students sent out photocompromising materials to students and teachers.
However, it is not necessary to act in porn to get such problems. The “Paper” edition tells the story of a girl Nastya, who found her boyfriend kissing another girl in the club, and decided to part with it. In response, the offended young man placed her nude photos and a link to the VKontakte page in an anonymous thread. After that, the girl received a lot of obscene messages, and her pictures were sent to relatives. It quickly became clear that the story of Nastya is frighteningly banal, and she is one of thousands of victims of cyberbullying.
Large-scale draining of intimate photographs of celebrities in 2014 also happened on 4chan. Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian, Brie Larson and others got under the scope. At first, one of the users suggested purchasing an archive of intimate photos from him for Bitcoins, but eventually decided to post it for free on anonymous forums. According to him, the tabloid TMZ offered him six-figure sums for the pictures, but the hacker decided to help his native 4chan.
The weirdest story about pornomst happened in the same year with Emma Watson. After her speech at the UN headquarters on equality, the site "Emma you are next" suddenly appeared with a time counter, the 4chan logo and a portrait of an actress wiping a tear. Media expected that this will be followed by the publication of photos of the actress naked. But this did not happen - instead of the counter, posts appeared on the site with calls to close 4chan and the logo of the non-existent company Rantic. Later it turned out that the action was organized by the SocialVEVO group, which specializes in fake online campaigns and commercial projects.
Anonymous on 11/28/17 Tue 11:33:15
interested in girls who do book reviews. On the one hand, the forum participants reproached them for their pretentiousness, on the other - they found the one who "spoke like a virgin," for which she became the immediate addressee of the sexual fantasies of commentators. Katie, that was the name of the girl, had to remove her channel and write a post on Tumblr, where she explained that she was faced with harassment and would no longer make videos with reviews of books.
What can we say about feminists who express their views in public. Anonyms poisoned Jezebel's columnist Anna Merlin: she received threats of rape, and stalkers contacted her relatives. The girl tried to contact the police, but each time she faced inaction. Other journalists also suffered: New York Times columnist Jonathan Weisman, feminist and writer Jessica Valenti (the trolls threatened to rape her five-year-old daughter). People from the forums also followed Julia Joffe, who wrote a text about Melania Trump in GQ. She was not the only one who was insulted for being Jewish and disliking Trump. Journalist Bethany Mandel was confronted with so many anti-Semitic messages that she bought herself a gun — the trolls frightened her so much.
Another attack on women was associated with the famous gamer game (a scandalous discussion of sexism in the game industry). The home address of game developers Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn posted on Reddit, and the girls were forced to move because of the growing number of threats. And the game critic Anita Sargsyan once had to cancel a lecture at the University of Utah due to the fact that an unknown man promised to arrange "the bloodiest shooting" in US history.
The new wave of bullying is largely due to the growing popularity of Trump. Last year, black actress Leslie Jones became the victim of the trolls and played in the new version of Ghostbusters. Anonymous did not like the fact that the classic caste of men was partially replaced by women and minorities. Having launched the hashtag #WhiteGenocide, alt-Raits from imageboards began to slander Leslie Jones with the support of their odious leader Milo Jannopoulos. As a result, the girl had to retire from Twitter for a while.
Anonymous on 11/28/17 Tue 11:57:19
fake complaints about rape at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The fact is that problems with rape at this university began to be investigated at the federal level, and fake complaints seriously complicated this process. The action fully fit the logic of the imageboard discussions: users denied that rape was a crime, or blamed women for it. In the fall of 2016, six women spoke about the harassment of the current US president. The “alternative right” Internet anonymous responded immediately: they launched the #NextFakeTrumpVictim hashtag on 4chan, distributing it across all mainstream social networks.
Sometimes users of boards try to act less straightforward and, as they think, witty. Here you can recall the failed action #pissforequality: anonymous people tried to poke fun at the feminists by launching a fake flashmob in support of the victims of rape, "who wet their pants during the attack." Photos of women with wet pants appeared on Twitter - however, the action did not become popular. The theme of violence against women was used in confrontation with the left. Under the hashtag #PunchWhiteWomen, the trolls laid out photos of victims of domestic violence with signatures in the spirit: "53% of white women - they should be beaten" or "No problem, she’s a Nazi."
Anonymous on 11/28/17 Tue 13:02:54
cohesive harassment - all this is well planned and clearly debugged. Anonymous and constitute a full-fledged instructions or texts for mailings, so that the new participants of the thread do not have to invent anything, they just need to join the already organized crusade. While Facebook fans are lazily scolding in the comments, on 4chan they quickly find the victim's home address and send her a couple of hundred threats.
Of course, imageboard owners have repeatedly called for more intensive moderation and almost the closure of sites. They were accused not only of insulting women, but also of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and all kinds of hate speech. Under public pressure, and simply for reasons of common sense, Reddit had to add additional clauses to its rules (previously, the official ban on publications concerned, in fact, only child pornography, the dissemination of personal data of other people and active spam). Nevertheless, owners of boards still do not have time to react quickly enough, so the responsibility for cleaning threads from haiterism lies with the users themselves.
After Trump's victory in the American elections, many investigations appeared about the political influence of the 4chan forum on the election campaign. And after that, we had to admit that the dark corner of the Internet is quite noticeable, and its expansion threatens not only cybercuts, but also a new tone of public debate, which turned out to be amazingly sensitive to the actions of the militant Internet minority.
