The story of 4chan

Brut America

It started as an online forum where users shared cat memes ... until it became the internet's hotbed for white nationalist ideas.  This is the story of 4chan.

Transcript

00:00People might think of 4Chan as sort of this playful space where memes come from,

00:05but the amount of sincere extremism on there is not to be underestimated.

00:17Who is this 4Chan?

00:30I translated it and hosted it, and a lot of its success has come from the fact that it was very different at the time.

00:37It was this image-based form of communicating that wasn't really quite popular in the US.

00:41This is just a website with different sub-forums where people can post pictures in threaded conversations.

00:49The conversation is raw, it's unfiltered, so you're getting a very truthful conversation.

01:03You judge somebody by the content of what they're saying and not their username, not their registration date.

01:09You can only have something like 160 threads that exist at any given time on a specific board,

01:14and for every new thread that's posted, an old one gets bumped off.

01:20Things like lore cats, so images of funny cats.

01:25You've probably been Rickrolled online, so you clicked on a link.

01:39A lot of the very old stuff was already quite toxic and quite racist, quite misogynist.

01:50How the website is designed is that it really encourages a small, insular group to communicate.

02:01I don't see myself as any more an advocate for anonymity than I do for identity.

02:06I'm just somebody who cherishes having options.

02:08This insular, subcultural way of thinking also really fosters antagonism and hatred towards outgroups,

02:16towards people that don't belong to them.

02:19It also brought forth the anonymous movements, which in a way was quite left-wing and quite progressive.

02:31They were taking down the Church of Scientology and also supported free speech.

02:38A lot of apolitical gamers, young males, were politicized because of the Gamergate controversy,

02:56which to them was a campaign against, what they said, ethics in video games, journalism.

03:02They told me they were coming to kill me.

03:04They told me specifically they were going to castrate my husband.

03:07And this kind of grew into resentment against liberals or social justice warriors,

03:14or what is now more sort of seen as resentment against woke or against cancel culture.

03:28Now with Hiroyuki Nishimura, he doesn't really seem to care about what happens on the platform.

03:38Hiroyuki Nishimura is the founder and CEO of 4chan.

03:46If one place censors things or deletes things, like Christopher Poole did with Gamergate back in 2014,

03:55then it's very easy for users to just create a new image board.

03:59So 8chan was created in response to the Gamergate discussion being banned from 4chan.

04:06We can't prevent people from being radicalized to violence,

04:09but we can address the relentless exploitation of the internet to recruit and mobilize terrorism.

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