Okay, so I want you to imagine a room. Right.
A huge cavernous room. And it's packed. There
are millions of people in there all screaming
at the top of their lungs all at the same time.
Okay, that's a stressful image. It is. And some
of them, you know, they're holding up these cute
pictures of cats with funny captions. The classics.
Right. And then standing right next to them are
people solving these... incredibly complex math
problems, stuff that has stumped university professors
for decades. And this is all happening in the
same room. In the same room, shoulder to shoulder.
But then you look over and right there, there
are people plotting how to just completely ruin
a stranger's life. Or, you know, worse. It's
a terrifying image. And I think the catch, the
part that makes it truly unnerving, is that the
lights are off. Exactly. The lights are off.
You can't see anyone's face. You have no idea
if the person next to you is a Nobel Prize winner,
a bored teenager, or a domestic terrorist. That
room exists. It's not a physical place, obviously.
It's a website. It's a website that The Guardian
once described as, and I love this quote, lunatic,
juvenile. Brilliant, ridiculous, and alarming.
All in the same breath. All in the same breath.
We are talking, of course, about 4chan. The asshole
of the internet as it has been so affectionately
dubbed. By its own community, no less. They wear
it like a badge of honor. They do. But here's
the thing that I think a lot of people get wrong.
They write 4chan off. They think, oh, that's
just that weird anime site from 2005 or, you
know, that's where the hackers live. A relic
of the old internet. But it's not. As of 2022,
this site was pulling in over 22 million unique
visitors every single month. I mean, that's the
population of a decent -sized country. It's huge.
It's not a relic. I think a better metaphor is
an active volcano. Yeah. And what's fascinating
to me and terrifying is the sheer range of what
comes out of that volcano. You have the rickroll.
completely harmless, silly fun that your grandma
knows about. And then from the same source, you
get the alt -right, you get Gamergate, and you
get legitimate body count violence. And that
is the mission for this deep dive. We aren't
just here to recite a history lesson. We're trying
to really figure out the mechanics of it. The
architecture. How does one simple website...
built by a 15 -year -old kid in his bedroom,
managed to be the birthplace of lolcats and the
inspiration for mass shootings. The code itself
shapes the behavior. It's not an accident. And
we have to talk about the now, the present day.
Because if you haven't been paying attention,
4chan has had a wild, wild 12 months. To say
the least. I mean, we're talking about the massive
hack in April 2025 that took the entire site
dark for weeks. And the current very intense
legal war they are fighting with the British
government. This is happening right now. So just
a quick heads up before we really get into the
weeds here. Yeah, this is important. We are going
to be discussing some heavy stuff. I mean, really
heavy. Radicalization, harassment, suicide, violence.
They're all integral parts of the 4chan story.
We're reporting on this as it happened based
on the source material. It's factual. Right.
We aren't endorsing any of this. Not for a second.
We're just trying to understand it. OK. So where
do we start? Let's go back. Way back. October
1st, 2003. The internet looked completely different.
Oh yeah. No Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube
as we know it. Mark Zuckerberg was still in a
dorm room. And in New York City, there was a
15 -year -old named Christopher Poole. Online,
he was known as Moot. Lowercase meme. Always.
And like a lot of 15 -year -olds in 2003, he
was really, really into anime. But he wasn't
just watching it on Toonami after school. He
was deep in the forums. Specifically, the Something
Awful forums. Now, Something Awful is a... Legendary
in its own right, a pillar of old Internet culture.
But for Poole, it had a problem. What was the
problem? It was too moderated, too structured.
And frankly, you had to pay $10 to join. The
$10 barrier. I remember that. That actually kept
a lot of people out. It was a quality filter
in a way. It was. But Poole was looking for something
else, something wilder. And he was looking east.
He was fascinated by a Japanese image board called
Futaba Channel. Which is also known as 2chan.
Right. 2chan was the template. In Japan, it was
already massive. It was anonymous. It was chaotic.
And it was entirely image -based, which was novel
at the time. Poole wanted to create an English
-language version of that for his friends to
talk about anime. I love this part of the story,
the actual creation. Because I think people imagine
this sophisticated software engineering project,
this stroke of genius. It was the absolute opposite
of that. He didn't write the code from scratch.
He went to Furtaba Channel. He found their open
source script. And this is the best part. He
ran the text through AltaVista Babblefish to
translate it. AltaVista Babblefish? Yeah. That
just unlocked a core memory for me. That was
the Google Translate of the Stone Age. It was
terrible. It barely worked. But it worked just
enough to get the site running. He rented a server
using his mother's credit card. Without her knowing,
I assume. Oh, unbeknownst to her, yes. And launched
4chan .net. So it's literally just a copy -paste
job. Copy -paste job. By a 15 -year -old. With
his mom's credit card. And a really clunky old
translation tool. It's amazing it even worked.
And initially it was just two boards. That's
it. A for anime and B for random. And B, well,
B became the monster. But before we get into
the culture, I want to drill down on those mechanics
you mentioned earlier. Because 4chan does not
work like Facebook. It doesn't work like Reddit.
It doesn't work like X or anything else you use
today. not at all the architecture the very bones
of the site are defined by two things anonymity
and ephemerality okay let's start with anonymity
on twitter or instagram your identity is your
currency you want followers you want clout you
build a brand exactly you are building a personal
brand your past posts haunt you your reputation
good or bad precedes you on 4chan there is no
registration you don't sign up you don't have
a profile picture you just show up you just show
up and when you post unless you manually type
in a name which almost nobody does the system
assigns you the name anonymous so everyone is
the same person yeah or no person at all in a
sense yeah it creates what people call a hive
mind and think about the psychology of that for
a second if i post something brilliant i don't
get the credit anonymous gets the credit if i
post something absolutely horrific i don't get
the blame anonymous gets the blame it completely
flattens the hierarchy what do you mean by that
well in normal social setting you know on twitter
If a famous person says something stupid, people
still listen because they're famous. Right. And
if nobody says something incredibly smart, it
might just get ignored. On 4chan, the only thing
that matters is the content of the post itself,
the image and the text. It doesn't matter who
you are. That sounds almost, I mean, ideally
that sounds kind of democratic. In theory, yes.
It's a pure meritocracy of ideas. But the flip
side of that coin is what psychologists call
the online disinhibition effect. When you strip
away identity, when you strip away accountability,
people stop behaving like they're in a civilization.
The social contract just dissolves. So you get
the rawest, most unfiltered version of the human
id. Precisely. Now add the second pillar to that,
ephemerality. The site has no memory. This is
so crucial to understanding it. Christopher Poole
gave a talk in Vienna back in 2009 where he explained
this perfectly. 4chan does not archive threads.
So there's no scroll back to see what they said
last year. There's no scroll back to see what
they said 10 minutes ago. A board like B moves
at breakneck speed. A new thread is posted. If
people comment on it, it gets bumped to the top.
If nobody comments, it slides down. Once it hits
page 10 or 15, depending on the board's settings,
it falls off the edge of the world. Deleted.
Gone forever. So if you post something and nobody
replies in five minutes... it effectively never
happened that's it and that creates a very very
specific evolutionary pressure on the content
survival of the fittest meme exactly if you want
an idea or a prank or a meme to survive on 4chan
you can't just post it once and hope people find
it in the archives later there are no archives
you have to repost it you have to repost it and
other people have to like it enough to save it
to their own hard drives and then repost it themselves
it forces the community to become the filter
It's natural selection on speed, only the content
that triggers a strong, immediate reaction, whether
it's funny, shocking, disgusting or catchy, survives.
Everything else, all the boring stuff is incinerated
immediately. That explains so much about why
the culture is so extreme. You have to be loud
to be heard before you're deleted. It favors
high impact, low context content. And that brings
us to the visual structure. It's an image board.
You can't just post text to start a thread. You
have to post a picture. And looking at the list
of boards now, there are over 75 of them, and
some are totally normal. O for automobiles, C
for cooking, you know, hobbies. And then there
is B. The random board. The sources, they paint
a pretty vivid picture of B. One description
I read calls it a high school bathroom stall.
That's a good one. Another says it's the kid
with a collection of butterfly knives and a locker
full of porn. Yeah, that's the aesthetic. So
what are the rules on B? There are almost no
rules. The only hard rule is no illegal content.
So no child pornography, though that has been
a constant grueling battle for the moderators
for 20 years. But everything else? Everything
else goes. Gore, hate speech, pornography, the
most grotesque humor you can imagine. It is the
unfiltered subconscious of the Internet for better
or very often for worse. And yet out of that
sewer. Yeah. We got some of the most recognizable
pieces of pop culture of the last two decades.
Well, this is the paradox. This is the whole
thing. You cannot separate the genius from the
slime. They are born from the exact same mechanism.
So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the
light side for a minute, the creative engine.
Because if we just sit here and say 4chan is
bad, we miss the entire point of why people go
there in the first place. People go there because
it's funny and because it's, against all odds,
surprisingly clever. Okay, case in point, the
Rick Roll. Everyone knows it. I think my grandma
knows what a rickroll is. But I didn't realize
the specific mechanics of how it started on 4chan.
It's a perfect example of the admin directly
influencing the culture in a weird way. So, back
in 2006, Moot, the founder, was just messing
with the user. Trolling his own site. Yes. For
the lults, that's the only reason anyone does
anything there, he implemented a word filter.
Anytime someone typed the word egg, the site
automatically changed it to duck. Okay. Why?
Just to be annoying. So this created a situation
where a pre -existing meme, a specific wheel
-based meme called Duck Roll. A duck roll. Someone
had a photoshopped a duck onto wooden wheels.
That's it. That's the whole joke. Right. So people
would post links with these sensational titles,
you know, leaked Halo 3 gameplay. And you click
it and it's just this picture of a duck on wheels.
You've been duck rolled. It's a classic bait
and switch. Okay. I'm with you. Then the trailer
for Grand Theft Auto The Thief comes out. The
hype is insane. The traffic is so high it crashes
the Rockstar Games website. Remember that. So
a 4chan user. On V, the video game board, posts
a link claiming to be a mirror of the trailer.
But it didn't link to the trailer. It linked
to Rick Astley's 1987 music video for Never Gonna
Give You Up. And because the Rick Roll beat and
switch mechanic was already established with
the duck roll. The Rick Roll was born and it
just exploded. It went from a niche 4chan in
-joke to being performed live by Rick Astley
himself at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
That's an incredible trajectory. Then you have
Lowell Katz. Katterday. Every Saturday, users
would just flood the boards with pictures of
cats. It was a wholesome tradition in a way.
And it created the visual language of Internet
memes as we know them. The impact font, the blocky
white text with the black outline. The misspelled
captions like, I can has cheeseburger. That didn't
start on Facebook. It wasn't born on Reddit.
It started on 4chan. It's just so weird to think
that the way we communicate online using images
with text overlays to convey an emotion or a
joke was basically standardized by a bunch of
anonymous anime fans. It's the dominant vernacular
of the modern world. But it's not just, you know,
silly memes. We absolutely have to talk about
the Harooey problem. I love this story. I love
it because it makes all the experts and academics
look so foolish. So break this down for me. Okay,
so we're on the Cyboard. Science and math. Which
is already a funny concept to me, an anonymous
mass board where everyone is just called anonymous.
It's surprisingly rigorous. I mean, there's a
lot of nonsense, but there's also real discussion.
So in 2011, an anonymous user posts a question
about an anime. Of course it's about an anime.
The show is called The Melancholy of Harui Suzumiya.
Now, this show has a really weird release structure.
The episodes were aired out of chronological
order. Classic confusing anime stuff. Right.
And the user wanted to know. What is the shortest
possible list of episodes you would need to watch
to see every single possible permutation of the
order? Okay, my brain just broke. What does that
mean? It means if you have, say, three episodes,
you want a single string of episode numbers where
you can find the sequence 1, 2, 3, but also 1,
3, 2, and 2, 1, 3, and so on for all six possibilities
in the shortest way possible. Mathematically,
this is a known problem called a super permutation.
It's in a field called combinatorics. And it
is incredibly difficult to calculate once you
get past a certain number of items. It sounds
hard. It had been an unsolved problem in mathematics
for about 25 years. Mathematicians had... lower
bounds and upper bounds for the solution, but
no exact efficient formula. And a 4chan user
just cracked it to watch their cartoon. Pretty
much. An anonymous poster, who was likely just
trying to optimize their anime watching, posted
a solution. They wrote out a proof. A simple,
elegant proof. Did they know what they were doing?
Did they know they were solving a huge math problem?
It's completely unclear. They treated it like
a casual puzzle. Just, here, I figured this out.
And the most amazing part is it took professional
mathematicians seven years to find this post.
Seven years. It wasn't until 2018 that a mathematician
stumbled on it, verified it, and realized that
this anonymous weeb had significantly advanced
the field of combinatorics. That is incredible.
It completely validates the hive mind theory.
If you put a million anonymous monkeys at typewriters,
eventually one of them solves a super permutation.
It's crowdsourced intellect in its purest. form.
And we see it on the music board, Moo, too. Moo
is notorious for being pretentious, right? Like
the snobbiest music fans on the planet. Incredibly.
But they are also powerful tastemakers. They
championed bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and
Death Grips way, way before the mainstream critics
at Pitchfork caught on. So they're ahead of the
curve. And sometimes they might even be part
of the creative process. There's a very persistent
rumor that the pop star lord was a Moo lurker.
Really? How did that start? Well, in late 2012,
a user posted a recording of the song Royals
on Moo, just asking for feedback. This was months
before it was officially released. No way. And
the users, in typical Moo fashion, just ripped
it apart. They critiqued it brutally. Later,
when Lorde got famous, people went back and looked
at the timestamp in the file. It seems legitimate.
So she used 4chan as an anonymous focus group.
It's possible she's denied it, but the evidence
is compelling. Another time, a user on Mo posted
about a dream they had where Kanye West released
a sequel to The Life of Pablo. They described
the album in detail. The board then collectively
decided to make that album. They made the album
from the dream. They did. It's called The Death
of Pablo. It's a massive remix album created
by dozens of anonymous users, all based on one
guy's dream. That's a collaborative art on a
level that's hard to comprehend. It is. But this
creative energy, this ability to organize, it
can be directed elsewhere. To activism. Project
Trinology. This feels like the moment where the
pranksters realized they had actual real world
power. This is the turning point. 2008. The site
is five years old. It's established its culture.
So set the scene for us. A video leaks online.
It's an internal Scientology video that was never
meant for public viewing, and it features Tom
Cruise. He's talking about the church in this
very intense, almost manic way. Oh, I remember
this video. Being a Scientologist, when you drive
past an accident, you know you're the only one
that can help. That one. That's the one. The
Church of Scientology went into absolute panic
mode. They tried to scrub the video from the
internet. They sent cease and desist letters.
They threatened lawsuits against anyone hosting
it. And 4chan took that personally. They saw
it as an act of censorship. And if there's one
thing that the 4chan hive mind hates, it's people
telling them what they can and can't see. A thread
started on B. Someone said, essentially, we need
to destroy these guys. But usually that just
means, you know, online pranks. And it started
that way. Ordering thousands of unpaid pizzas
to Scientology centers. Right. Sending them all
-black faxes to drain their ink cartridges. Just
classic low -level harassment. Not for the lots.
But then it escalated. A video was uploaded to
YouTube by a user calling themselves Anonymous.
It had a robotic text -to -speech voice. A graphic
of static. And the message was... We are anonymous.
We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.
Expect us. Chills. I mean, that's iconic now.
It went massively viral. And then something completely
unprecedented happened. They organized a real
world protest. Getting people to leave their
computers and go outside. For 4chan users, that
seems impossible. On February 10th, 2008, thousands
of people gathered outside Scientology centers
in cities all over the world. London, New York,
Sydney, LA. But they had a problem. They are
anonymous. They needed to stay anonymous in real
life. So they wore the masks. They wore the Guy
Fawkes mask from the movie V for Vendetta. And
the reason wasn't even that deep. It was simply
the only mask that was available in bulk at costume
stores at the time. So practicality created a
global symbol. It did. And suddenly you had this
visual army. It proved that the hive mind could
manifest in physical reality. It could put bodies
on the street. That feels like the absolute peak
of the light side. Or at least the gray side.
They were fighting a controversial organization.
They felt like digital vigilantes. They were
the underdogs. It was a David and Goliath story.
But power is addictive. And the tools they sharpened
during projectionology doxing, swarm harassment,
media manipulation, those tools didn't go away
when the protests stopped. No. They were just
waiting for a new target. And this is where we
have to pivot. We have to, you know, kill the
laughter for a minute. Because the story of 4chan
is not just about funny cats and fighting Scientology.
No. It gets dark. And I don't mean edgy internet
dark. I mean life -ruining, life -ending dark.
The shift. It really seems to happen around 2014.
That was a watershed year. That's the year. Everything
changed. The lulls stopped being just for laughs.
They became weaponized. The cruelty became the
point. And we have to start with Gamergate. This
was the cultural pivot point, not just for 4chan,
but for the entire internet. It started, believe
it or not, with a very personal, messy blar post
by an ex -boyfriend of an independent game developer
named Zoe Quinn. A breakup post. Yeah, a long,
rambling breakup post. On any other site... In
any other community, it would have been ignored.
But on 4chan? On 4chan, specifically the video
game board V and the robot board R9K, it became
a lightning rod. It wasn't just about a breakup
anymore. It morphed almost instantly into a sprawling
conspiracy theory about ethics in video game
journalism. But that was just a cover story.
It's a very thin veil for what it really was.
A massive coordinated harassment campaign against
women in the gaming industry. Zoe Quinn, Brianna
Wu, Anita Sarkeesian. And when we say harassment,
we aren't talking about mean comments on Twitter.
No, we are talking about industrial scale abuse.
Doxing, releasing home addresses, phone numbers,
family information, nonstop death threats, rape
threats, bomb threats called into events where
they were scheduled to speak, people having to
flee their homes and go into hiding for months.
It was a swarm attack and it was organized largely
on 4chan. And Moot, the founder, Christopher
Poole, he actually stepped in. He did. And this
shocked the user base to its core. He banned
all discussion of Gamergate on 4chan. He said
it violated the site's rules on personal attacks
and witch hunts. That must have caused a revolt.
Banning something on the No Rules site. It was
a civil war. Thousands of users left in a rage.
They claimed 4chan had been compromised by social
justice warriors. They migrated to a new site,
8chan, which was created to be even more lawless
and unmoderated. And 8chan became its own horror
story. It did. But the damage to 4chan's culture
was done. The users who stayed were angrier,
more radicalized. The fang trolls had been replaced
by ideologues. And this feeds directly into the
rise of the alt -right. We see the board poll
politically incorrect, becoming a major, major
force in global politics. Poll is arguably the
most dangerous place on the internet. It actually
started as a board called New for News, but it
was deleted because it got too racist. They deleted
it for being too racist. And then they brought
it back. They brought it back as poll and it
just got worse. It shifted from what was originally
kind of a left libertarian anti -government vibe
in the early days to being the central hub for
alt -right and neo -Nazi sentiment online. Explain
the irony part because you hear that a lot as
a defense. Oh, we're not actually racist. It's
just a joke. We're just being ironic. It's a
phenomenon called irony poisoning. It works like
this. You start by posting a racist meme because
it's shocking and taboo. It's edgy. You laugh
at the reaction you get. You tell yourself, I'm
not a racist. I'm just trolling. But you keep
doing it. You keep doing it. You're surrounded
by other people doing it. And eventually the
people who aren't joking show up, the actual
sincere white supremacists. And they think they
found their people. The lines start to blur.
And suddenly you aren't posting the swastika
as a joke anymore. You're starting to believe
the things you're saying ironically. Exactly.
And this is how Pohl became the primary distribution
center for things like the Great Replacement
Theory, the conspiracy that white populations
are being systematically replaced by immigrants.
And this wasn't just theory being discussed in
a dark corner of the Internet. It led to real
world action. We have to look at the timeline
of violence. It's a literal body count. The hoaxes
came first. In 2006, a grocery clerk caused a
panic by threatening dirty bombs at seven NFL
stadiums. It was a 4chan post. It was. Then there
was the Steve Jobs heart attack hoax that caused
Apple stock to dip. Bomb threats at high schools.
But then it turned from hoaxes to... to murder.
Let's talk about the Port Orchard murder in 2014.
This is one of the most disturbing things I've
ever had to research for one of these deep dives.
It's horrific. So a user posts on Bee. The post
says, check the news for Port Orchard, Washington
in a few hours. He then posts photos, photos
of a nude woman's body with what look like red
marks around her neck. He posted the body. On
the forum. Yes. And the users initially thought
it was fake. It's B. They assume everything is
fake. They were joking about it, making light
of it. Of course they were. Then the user posted
more photos. And he wrote, and this is a direct
quote, turns out it's way harder to strangle
someone to death than it looks on the movies.
My God. While the users on Key were debating
whether this was real or some elaborate prank,
the police in Washington were discovering the
body of a 30 -year -old woman named Amber Coplin.
Her killer, David Kalak, had posted her crime
scene photos to 4chan before the police had even
arrived on the scene. He turned the audience
into accomplices, or at least witnesses after
the fact. It treats murder as content. It gamifies
real life tragedy. And that's the through line
to the mass shootings. The Buffalo shooting in
2022. Peyton Goodrum. He drove to a supermarket
in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo
and killed 10 people. He livestreamed it. And
in his manifesto, which he uploaded online, he
explicitly traced his radicalization back to
Pohl. He named the board. He named the board.
He said he started browsing 4chan in May of 2020
out of pandemic boredom. He went from looking
at memes on the main page to the infographics
on Pohl about the Great Replacement Theory. Two
years later, he was a mass murderer. That is
the radicalization funnel in action. Yeah. And
that's it for the memes. You stay for the community
and you end up poisoned by the ideology. And
we see the same pattern with the incel movement
on R9K. The Toronto van attacker, Alec Manassian,
who killed 10 people in 2018, posted on Facebook
right before his attack, the incel rebellion
has already begun. He praised Elliot Rodger.
He referenced a beta uprising, which was a meme
that originated on 4chan. The site provides the
vocabulary and the community. for these lonely,
angry men to turn their pain outwards into violence.
It's an echo chamber for the absolute worst impulses.
It's heavy. It is incredibly heavy. And this
legacy of violence and chaos, it brings us to
the present day because 4chan is not just there
as a historical artifact. It is currently fighting
for its very existence. Right. Section 4. The
modern era. This is the stuff that hasn't made
the history books yet because it's all happening
right now. First off, Christopher Poole's gone.
He's been gone for a while. He got out in 2015.
He posted a final message and stepped down citing
stress. I can't imagine the stress of running
that site for over a decade. He sold it. He sold
it to Hiroyuki Nishimura. The founder of 2chan.
The founder of 2chan. The Japanese guy whose
code he copied in the first place. You can't
make this stuff up. Talk about full circle. But
Nishimura basically inherited a sinking ship
financially. Advertisers won't touch 4chan with
a 10 -foot pole. At one point, he posted a now
famous thread titled Winter is Coming, where
he basically begged users to buy 4chan Pass subscriptions
because they couldn't pay the server bills. So
it's always been on the verge of collapse. And
then came the hack. April 14th, 2025. just last
year this was massive just catastrophic for them
imagine you're a user you log on to the site
you expect the usual chaos instead the site is
dead and there's a message claiming responsibility
from a group associated with a rival site called
soyjack .party soyjack .party i can't believe
i'm saying these words out loud on a serious
deep dive what is that it's a rival image board
a splinter group of former 4chan users they hated
the current moderation on 4chan they thought
it was too soft if you can believe that they
thought 4chan was too soft, so they nipped it.
They didn't just take it offline, they gutted
it. They leaked the entire source code. They
leaked the email addresses of the volunteer moderators
and anyone who had ever paid for a 4chan pass.
And worst of all, they even restored deleted
threads and boards. They broke the ephemerality,
that no memory feature. They broke it. They broke
the one sacred rule. For nearly two weeks, 4chan
was dark. The final post that anyone could see
before the plug was pulled was a completely random
quote from a Minecraft movie which had just come
out. What was the quote? Chicken jockey. Chicken
jockey. That was the epitaph of 4chan for two
weeks. It was. And it showed that the site is
held together by duct tape and string. But the
bigger threat to their existence isn't hackers.
It's the government. Specifically, the UK government.
This is the legal battle. With cum. Right. So
the UK passed a sweeping new law called the Online
Safety Act 2023. And basically it says that if
you operate a website that's accessible in the
UK, you have a duty of care. You have to protect
children from harmful content. You have to implement
age verification. You have to remove illegal
speech quickly. These sound like reasonable requirements
for a normal business. They are impossible existential
requirements for a site like Fortune. In June
2025. Ofcom, the UK regulator, opened an investigation.
They sent a formal request for information to
4chan's owners. And how did 4chan respond? They
didn't. They just completely ghosted them. That
is a bold strategy. Ofcom got angry. They threatened
massive fines. Finally, 4chan's legal team responded.
And the letter they sent, it was pure 4chan attitude
distilled into a legal document. Do you have
the quote? I do. Their lawyer wrote that 4chan
will not pay any penalty. and stated that American
businesses do not surrender their First Amendment
rights to, and this is the key part, foreign
bureaucrats. Wow. Foreign bureaucrats. They really
said that. They basically told the UK government
to pound sand. Their argument is that because
they are a US company, UK law stops at the border.
The internet is global, but their legal obligations
are American. But didn't they take it a step
further than just sending a letter? They did.
This is the wild part. On August 27th, 2025.
4chan, along with another controversial site,
Kiwi Farms filed a lawsuit against Ofcom in a
U .S. federal court. They sued the regulator
that was investigating them. They are asking
a U .S. judge to declare that Ofcom has no jurisdiction
over them. This is a huge, huge deal. It's a
test case for the entire future of the Internet.
Can a country like the U .K. or France or Germany
enforce their content laws on a U .S.-based platform?
If 4chan loses this case, what happens? They
might have to just block access from the entire
UK. Or shut down completely, because if they
have to start verifying IDs to comply with age
-gating rules, the anonymity, the core principle
of the site, is dead. It's a genuine battle for
the soul of the open web. It is. The Wild West
versus the modern regulated state. Before we
wrap up with those big philosophical questions,
I want to briefly touch on some of the specific
neighborhoods of 4chan we might have missed.
Because the site isn't a monolith. It's a collection
of very different, very weird subcultures. Right.
We have to mention R9K again, the robot board.
What is the specific mechanic there that makes
it different? It runs a script called Robot 9000.
And the script has one rule. If you post a comment.
that has heavily repeated text or is identical
to a previous post, the script automatically
bans you for a short time. So it forces originality.
You have to say something new every time you
post. That was the goal. It was a social experiment.
It was supposed to force creativity, to stop
people from just spamming the same memes over
and over. And what happened instead? Instead,
it created a culture of people sharing their
most intense personal misery. Because that was
the only thing unique they had to offer. It became
the depression engine of the internet. A place
for green text stories about social failure.
And that, in turn, fueled the incel movement.
A completely failed... Social experiment. And
it astrophically failed. Then on the other end
of the spectrum, there's MLP, My Little Pony.
Okay, why does a My Little Pony board exist on
4chan? Because the bronies, the community of
adult male fans of the show, were spamming every
other board so hard back in 2011 that everyone
else revolted. It was a containment strategy.
Moot created MLP as a quarantine zone, a ghetto.
Go play with your ponies over there and leave
the rest of us alone. And it developed its own
entire subculture. A massive one. Sometimes they
would have organized raids against pole and vice
versa. Fights between the neo -Nazis and the
My Little Pony fans. You cannot make this stuff
up. And what about sock? the social board this
is the weirdest most unexpected anomaly of the
last couple of years in late 2023 or early 2024
an anonymous user on sock which is supposed to
be for meetups built and released a 4chan dating
app a dating app yeah for 4chan users that sounds
like a disaster waiting to happen it's called
dupe and for a brief window it was trending higher
than e -harmony on the app store it was filled
with trolls and horrible people obviously but
it was also filled with genuinely lonely people
trying to find some kind of connection in this
digital wasteland. It proves that even in the
most toxic environment imaginable, people are
still desperate not to be alone. Exactly. It's
a very human impulse. There is one last thing
we have to acknowledge before we synthesize all
this. The language. We can't do a deep dive without
mentioning how 4chan pollutes the global vocabulary.
It's a laboratory for hate speech, a factory
for slurs. We mentioned the term Pajit in the
outline. This is a slur against Indian people.
A vicious one. And it started on 4chan around
2015. They created cartoons, memes, stereotypes,
a whole racist ecosystem around this word. And
now. Now you see it everywhere. You see that
word on X. You see it in YouTube comments. You
probably hear it in schoolyards. 4chan. generates
derogatory language that then spreads to the
rest of the internet like a virus. It manufactures
the weapon and the rest of the internet picks
it up and fires it. That's the perfect analogy.
So here we are. At the end of it all, we've covered
the funny cats. We've covered the anonymous math
geniuses. We've covered the murderers. We've
covered the government lawsuits. It's a lot to
process. It's a dizzying spectrum. How do we
synthesize this? Because my brain wants to put
it in a neat box. I want to say 4chan is evil.
Shut it down. But then I think about the Harui
problem. I think about the freedom of information
during Project Chinology. It is the ultimate
paradox of free speech online. 4chan is the Wild
West. And the Wild West was romantic. It was
free. It was open. Anything was possible, but
was also violent and lawless and unbelievably
cruel. And you can't have the freedom without
the danger. Not with this architecture. The anonymity
and the ephemerality are the same tools that
allow for both incredible creativity and incredible
evil. If you give people a mask, some will use
it to tell truth to power and some will use it
to hurt people for fun. 4chan proves that humans
are capable of both, often in the same thread,
just seconds apart. And this lawsuit with Ofcom,
that's really the core question, isn't it? It's
asking, is the Wild West even allowed to exist
in 2026? Precisely. The modern world and modern
governments want safety. They want curated spaces.
We want to know who is speaking. We want accountability.
We want to ban the hate speech. But if you sanitize
the entire internet, if you force everyone to
use their real ID, if you moderate every single
comment, you might lose the chaotic primordial
souk that created the culture we now take for
granted. And you might lose the pressure valve.
That's the scary thought, isn't it? If 4chan
disappears tomorrow... Where do those 22 million
people go? Do they just stop being angry or creative
or weird? No. Or do they go somewhere darker,
somewhere harder to track, and somewhere even
more radical? So the final provocative thought
for you, the listener, is this. In a world of
increasing digital surveillance and carefully
curated online identities is a space like 4chan
a dangerous relic that needs to be destroyed?
Or is it a necessary ugly pressure valve for
the weirdest and worst parts of humanity? If
you close the sewer, the pipes might just burst
in your own basement. A grim image to end on.
But a necessary one. This is the reality of the
deep web. It's not pretty, but we have to be
willing to look at it. Indeed. Thank you for
listening. This has been The Deep Dive. Stay
safe out there.