No.27291
Increasingly, the majority of people are content to experience the online world through the warm, blue-white glow of Facebook. But beyond the closed ecosystems of giant tech companies, the open web remains populous, anonymous, strange and sometimes, very unpleasant.
Take 4chan, which launched in the mid-2000s describing itself as "a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images anonymously." The site's sparse moderation and almost-anything-goes policy attracted disaffected teens, video game lovers, internet pranksters, hackers, and a sizable number of virulent racists. Best known as an incubator of memes—think Pepe the Frog or Rickrolling—it came onto the radar of the national media when members of the hacking group Anonymous started gathering there to plan pranks. By 2009 Fox News was (absurdly) referring to 4chan as the home of "the most powerful people on the Internet."