Web Raids & 4chan

[Jubal]

So a good friend just posted a FB status on a 4Chan "raid" on tumblr. Usually I'm very prepared to see brief spamming of social media sites to be kind of amusing, but this one seems to be totally beyond the pale - with them spamming images of gore and unpleasant porn to tags often used by survivors of rape and abuse. And then threatening people who criticised this with hacking or editing their face into porn and spreading it everywhere. Which is all really quite sickening, and leads one to the worrying conclusion that white western males and cats are the only groups 4chan thinks have rights.

Am I the only one who thinks 4Chan just seems to be desperately casting around to retain relevance? The interweb kind of seems to be moving on from them and all they have left is the weirdest and most aggressive fringe of users. And it's getting a bit pitiful really if all they can do is go out, find relatively vulnerable people and be unbelievably insensitive to them.

[Othko97]

I agree that this is way too far, and that the people responsible are not only insensitive and abusive, but also malevolent in this case. This attack was clearly intended to distress or stir up the radical feminist community which is exceedingly active on tumblr (who are not entirely innocent of spreading hatred themselves). However, this attack will also have affected actual victims of this abuse and may be damaging to unstable individuals, which the users responsible must have known.

That said, I do think it is a bit of a generalisation to say that this was the entirety of 4chan. My guess would be that it is a (by no means small) minority of users trying for shock value or just plain douchebaggery, perhaps to keep 4chan in the public eye, perhaps to cause some clamour in the radfems of tumblr, possibly both. I do agree with your general premise, in that 4chan has certainly moved towards a more aggressive and "edgy" userbase, most likely due to early teens finding the site and perpetuating the idiocy.

[Jubal]

I guess I feel like the fact that 4chan allows itself to be a base for this means that there's some kind of tacit acceptance of this across the community; these people are clearly being neither moderated nor called out by the 4chan user base, which one would hope for with things this violent ( or some other escapades like posting flashing stuff on epilepsy boards which is really dangerous). I don't know if this is younger users or a backlash by older ones...

As regards radfems, almost none of the people I know fit that category - I think the 4chan side like to overestimate the size of the radical feminist lobby, most tumblr feminism is of a relatively reasonable and inclusive sort and the "women are superior" and transphobic branches of feminism are really not that big. They just get their beliefs painted onto all feminists to discredit them (much like the far right assuming that every Muslim is a terrorist and every socialist is a Stalinist). Obviously the TERF types are awful people and spread a great deal of hatred, but this was I think meant to get at feminists generally rather than the actual radical hate group wing.

[Othko97]

Agreed wholeheartedly. I think it is quite easy to overestimate the size of the insane breed of feminist, as they are much, much more vocal than rational human beings, but I agree it seems very 4chan-esque to launch an attack on all feminists, it seems to line up with the general views of the user base. 4chan does allow itself to be a haven for a community like it has, as the users are not moderated. In many cases the users themselves provide some sort of basic level of moderation, but that only really extends to posts which are on the limits of legality. I think the whole point of 4chan is as almost a social experiment to see what a world without censorship and identities would be like, and thus the lack of moderation. I'm pretty sure the founder did a TED talk discussing the whole anonymity of the site, and how it is a double edged sword.

[Mars]

From what I gather, it all started with Tumblr going to /b/ (and possibly /pol/) and posting stuff with the intention of getting 4chan shut down (stuff like threatening to kill themselves and stuff like that). It might be best to stay well away from that whole issue, it could get messy.

[Cuddly Khan]

[snip]
Am I the only one who thinks 4Chan just seems to be desperately casting around to retain relevance?

[snip] perhaps to keep 4chan in the public eye, [snip]

The fact that this thread exists proves that they got what they wanted. I agree though, 4chan contains a lot of messed up people with way too much time on their hands.

[Jubal]

Mars: two wrongs don't make a right, quite simply. And in any case that doesn't make sense, there's nothing about posting suicide threats that could reasonably lead to4chan being shut down (if there was, safe to say we would no longer have Facebook). The version I heard was that some people had posted feminist GIFs... But whichever is true, I think that shoving graphic violent and sexual imagery in the face of rape victims is a far more gratuitously nasty act and has potentially far worse effects on far more vulnerable people.

Othko: yeah, agreed on all points. It'd be interesting to rerun the 4chan experiment now without the gender/ethnic user base slant and see how that went...

Khan: I did consider that irony, but I think it's good to discuss this kind of thing, particularly in places like this where our own user base has some linkages to both sides/sites.

[TTG4]

I suspect it's only a minority of 4chan visitors who participate in this sort of thing. I've found it interesting to look in on in the past, but mostly it's as dull as the sites they claim to hate (tumblr, reddit, 9gag). The fact they went for survivors of sexual assault was a bit far I agree, I suspect it was driven by the simplistic logic of assuming the extremists represent the entire community. I doubt anyone would attempt to close 4chan down, it's only really /b/ and /pol/ that cause any problems and even if they were closed down then people will just move elsewhere.