Many 4chan users call mebattletoad Attack the left message. I listened to everything. A pattern soon emerged: young people, even nervous, were reluctant to leave a message, trying to harass a stranger, which seemed like hell. For 15 years I spent these voicemails never left me because I covered 4chan reporters.
Those timid men turned into the violence of the Internet, with a boiling background, I had a front seat. The power engine of reactionary hatred is dissatisfied with everything and everyone simply because dissatisfaction is the only language its users know how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s and tracked the impact of 4chan on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan and Brazil as 4chan users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism and cyberbullying. And, to some extent, they did. But the universality of 4chan culture is ultimately a strange victory for the location itself.
Like me, Collins was followed by the rise of 4chan’s informal propaganda organs from the internet back to the Trump administration in the 2010s. As he saw, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, 4chan really doesn’t make any sense. Why hide anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same type of extremist content under your real name, or even pay for it?
“[4chan’s] “The user base just entered a larger court and began to immediately impact American life and policy,” Collins said. “When they say what you hear every day on Twitter now, then six months later, from the mouth of government officials, it’s useful as an ammunition dump in the cultural war.”
But to understand how 4chan goes from home to a cat meme to a true internet bogey, it requires understanding how the site actually works. Its characteristics are often overlooked in all the conversations about the political impact of the website, but I think they are equally important, if not more important.
4chan was founded by Christopher “Moot” Poole, who was only 15 years old at the time. A normal user has something horrible on an anarchic comedy site, and Poole created a spin-off site called “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Prostitute” for the message board there. Poole is a fan of Japanese message board 2Chan or Futaba Channel and wants to provide his own version for Western anime fans, so he mistranslated the website’s code and promoted his new website 4Chan to the horrible anime community. During this process, several core functions have been ported.
The 4chan user is anonymous, the thread is not permanent, and will time out or “404” after inactivity, and you can publish dozens of daughterboards. It turns out that the unique combination of ephemeral, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a valid combination that instantly created a different kind of difference from anything else on the web. Technology to build the Internet – the dark end of utopianism. On 4chan, you don’t have anyone unless it’s so shocking, so offensive, so hateful that others notice that it doesn’t matter before it disappears into the digital ether.
