4chan is a very popular internet forum with more than 1 billion messages and about 7 million visitors a day. 4chan was founded on October 1 2003 by the then 15-year-old Christopher Poole, known as “moot”. 4chan is mainly about posting and commenting on images. Users can produce completely anonymously. Images and comments on every conceivable subject. The site is based on the Japanese Internet forum Futaba Channel and is divided into 56 different subforums, called ‘boards’. The boards are divided into six categories: Japanese Culture, Interests, Creative, Adult (18 +) Miscellaneous (18 +) and Others. The most popular (and infamous) is the random board, which is called /b/.
4chan users are responsible for creating or popularizing many so-called internetmemes. Examples of memes are Lolcats, Rickrolling, “Uncle Dolan” as a parody of Donald Duck?and ‘troll physics’, where inventions are presented which mock the laws of nature (especially the effect of magnets are a source of humor).?The website has also come to play a role in internet activism. 4chan played an important role in the development of the concept of Anonymous?as a group of anonymous people who carry out coordinated actions on the Internet.
Because of the anonymity of the participants and the ‘no rules’ policy on /b/ board exchanging child pornography among users was a big problem. To counter this, 4chan members and other users used a drawing of a bear to indicate that a user had posted illegal pornographic content. This created the internet meme Pedobear. The bear was originally used in Japan as a sign for ‘security’ during construction work.
Schools closed in the city of Leiden?
4chan recently played a role when a message was posted that caused all secondary schools in Leiden to close down. The Internet forum 4Chan called the threats against the Leiden schools, but also to schools in The Hague and Breda in 2009, “a form of artistic work”. 4chan suggests that posts should not be taken seriously. The disclaimer on the forum 4Chan writes:”The stories and information posted here are a form of artistic work based on fiction and fabrications. Only a fool would take anything that is published here seriously.” The posts are online for an average of ten minutes and are then deleted. Nevertheless international authorities follow forum daily. The anonymous announcement of a shooting at an unnamed school in Leiden was fished by Swiss investigators. The poster is hiding behind an open proxy server and can therefore be difficult to find. Internet Lawyer Wouter Dammers of the Amsterdam office ICT-Law states that 4Chan is merely intended “to shock and offend.” ‘From a legal perspective the question is whether the poster of the message on the Leiden school actually had the intention of doing it,” says Dammers about the fuss in Leiden. 4Chan is known for ‘everything is possible and everything goes’. It is a haven for Internet users , but isn’t taken seriously by anyone. ”
Conviction in The Hague
The Public Prosecutor, the Court of Appeal in The Hague and the Supreme Court think differently. The posts typically follow shootings elsewhere in schools. That happened to a man from Breda and a student from The Hague in 2009 following school shootings in Germany and the U.S. In an ongoing lawsuit against the man from The Hague a definitive sentence for threatening Maerlant College in The Hague is likely. Lawyer Isabelle Huisman defends the 27-year-old who was arrested for a post on 4Chan in 2009:”Tomorrow I will go and kill some peeps from my old school, the Maerlant College in The Hague”.
The suspect stated that it was a joke. The court agreed with him, but the Court sentenced him to do 180 hours of community service. Huisman believes that her client should have to go unpunished, because the probability is low that one of the students at the College Maerlant has ever read the threat. “Those posts are just online for ten minutes and are then deleted. At that time only 20 people from the Netherlands are online in the middle of the night.”?The Supreme Court has ruled on an appeal request and brought the case back to the Court. The chance of acquittal is “not very big.” according to Huisman.
Another example of 4Chan in criminal investigations from the USA:
Boston Bombings
The Internet Hivemind put vigilantes in place for the search on the person(s) who placed two bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line. Users browsing 4Chan/b/, a photo bulletin board that is publicly known for disturbing humor and weird porn, has numerous photo galleries of the attack. Massive amounts of people scanned, for example, a man circled with black pants, a black shirt and a white hat. He wore a black backpack. According 4Channers suspiciously similar to the ?backpack the?explosion ripped to shreds. It’s an?Al Jazeera-like story that gets worse when a 4Channer notices that the backpack of the man seems to be missing in the subsequent aerial footage.
This image then became a great conversation topic with 7000 comments on Tumblr, which Based Heisenberg reported about in the now closed “4chan thread”.
Other links 4Channers link to the same ‘Al Jazeera pictures’ with a taller man who was wearing a maroon T-shirt and blue jacket. The big difference: The backpack, as shown in the photo Al Jazeera, had a silver trim on both straps.
The community also works behind the scenes in a Google Docs spreadsheet to list all the individuals found and investigated. The suspects have notable names like “Mr Cardigan”,”the 4Chan Music Man”,”Bending Over guy”, and the two aforementioned “Backpack Bros.”
But 4Chan 4Chan would not be 4 Chant if there was no satire. So jokes about “Where’s Waldo?” are made and photos with many many features?make fun of the citizen investigations.
Sources: Wikipedia, NOS, NU.nl.