Why does 4chan still exist?
4chan is unruly and outdated — so why hasn’t it been consigned to the realm of not-fit-for-purpose social media?
Newcomers to the baby-blue walls of 4chan’s infamous bulletin-board forums may be forgiven for mistaking it at first glance for an antenatal advice chatroom — and this would actually not be too far wrong. 4chan is an image-board style online forum where users can share comments and pictures in a variety of themed threads, ranging from comic books to politics. On the surface 4chan appears to be totally harmless, and indeed creator Christopher Poole intended the site to be just that when he founded it back in 2003. In reality 4chan is a lawless wasteland — perhaps best described as the internet’s answer to Dante’s ninth circle of hell.
Those who incur 4chan’s wrath will be flung head-first into its spiralling, churning, tooth-bearing oblivion. After all, 4chan is the unrelenting force that hacked into and exposed Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account during the 2008 presidential election, and leaked nude pictures of dozens of female celebrities. Users of 4chan even caused Apple’s stock price to plummet after a hoax article was published by CNN announcing Steve Job’s death. The story was, of course, eventually traced back to the internet’s rotten heart, but its perpetrators had long since upped-sticks and fled.
Getting a hold on this band of internet vigilantes has proven a tall-task in the past. 4chan operates a no-registration system, meaning all users simply appear under the username anonymous. As a result, items posted on the site are unrestricted and only explicitly illegal posts are removed, leaving 4chan a totally free space for people to express any view imaginable, no matter how abhorrent (and yes, I really do mean that.)
In the past, 4channers have been responsible for distributing child pornography, inciting acts of terror and, somehow even more shockingly, barraging a grieving father with images of his daughter’s dead body following a high-speed car crash. More recently, 4chan has been plagued by financial troubles due to high infrastructure costs. It seemed for a time that this black hole was finally ready to implode in on itself — but waves of support from ardent 4channers prevented it from folding. Second generation owner Hiroyuki Nishimura has since split the site into two domains; 4channel.org and 4chan.org. The former hosts all the clean, cuddly, revenue-friendly forums, allowing the latter to remain a burbling — though now somewhat benign — cesspool of human waste.
At its very best 4chan was as an online vigilante justice league, inflicting cruel punishments on large corporations and small-time wrongdoers — nothing and nobody was safe from 4chan’s ire. Nowadays, however, we’re looking at the ruins of a formerly prosperous empire. Its forums, built on a clunky interface better suited to the nineties than the burgeoning twenty-twenties, are now the playground of the alt-right and sex-starved thirty-somethings. Everything points to 4chan being a form of social media no longer fit for purpose, yet nonetheless this community continues to draw in more than 22m (purportedly university educated) 18–34 year olds per month. There are no two ways about it, 4chan must be doing something right — and to find out what, it’s important to consider the other side of the social-media coin.
Unlike its contemporaries, 4chan presents social media in its most primal form, not dictated by flashy icons or sleek designs. Interaction is placed at the forefront of the medium, with freedom of speech being its defining principle. It seems that, for better or for worse, 4chan has won a following on the basis that its users can express any view at all, using language that would turn Katie Hopkin’s face purple, all the while shrouded by a layer of anonymity simply not afforded by Facebook. In a world where Instagram has censored the nipple, 4chan makes no bones about letting everything hang loose.
Attempts to censor 4chan came and went at a time when its vitriolic content was spilling from the seams — but the 4chan of 2020 is a different beast to that of a decade or more ago. The majority of 4chan’s 63 boards concern matters such as Japanese anime or chocolate tempering tips. The only really concerning stuff is to be found on the legendarily crass /b/ (random) and /pol/ (politically incorrect) forums, where porn and swastikas are rife. A small part of 4chan is an icky quagmire of not-safe-for-work content — but who’s to say where this community would set up camp should the site be censored or deleted outright? Twitter’s administrators (who only just clocked Katie Hopkins’ raving bigotry) would keel over at the sight of such a group of reprobates. Facebook can’t even handle your Brexiteer aunt and Britain-First uncle, they just wouldn’t see the attack coming. This dormant hornet’s nest may even be provoked enough by another censorship attempt that their protests spill onto the streets, causing far more damage to our frail democracy than this internet sub-culture ever could.
Make no mistake, 4chan is an unruly, unpleasant and outdated platform. It houses a community of people whose views should never see light of day and, for the most past, it does a stellar job of keeping them contained to a small, putrid social hub. If you’re offended, shocked or disgusted by 4chan I would simply advise staying as far away from it as possible and, as a courtesy, it will stay far away from you.
(4chan user statistics: http://www.4chan.org/advertise)
