The lights are back on in the internet’s basement; 4chan is live and available to all anonymous posters who wish to use it.
The image board, which has been around since 2003, has long been a hotbed of extreme and uncomfortable content deemed unfit for any social media platform where names are attached to posts, according to The New Yorker. That ecosystem of trolls and extremists went dark on April 12 when a hack stemming from a user with a United Kingdom IP address uploaded an illegitimate PDF, according to Cybernews. It returned online April 27, bringing its baggage home with it.
Communications and Philosophy Department Chair Amber Davisson said 4chan’s reputation precedes its current area of impact.
“4chan has always had notoriety. It was notorious for being the place that no one had ever heard of,” Davisson said. “This was the place we pointed to as the bad place online that only the bad people go to, except we all know it exists.”
Davisson said 4chan has gradually shifted from total unmoderated anonymous chaos to a slightly more regulated space and speculated the hack may originate from someone aiming to troll the site as a rebellion against that regulation.
“It’s a way of mocking it as a cultural hotspot of the internet, like, ‘You’re not the cool place anymore,’” Davisson said. “I think they had already lost some of their status as the true underbelly of the internet.”
Davisson also highlighted one of the significant defining traits of the website’s user base, largely made up of trolls.
“We could talk about [how] 4chan is the DNA of the internet and it changed American politics and all of this stuff, and it’s like, it was also just really f***ing annoying.”
Davisson said she could not confidently speak about any spaces that may now be considered the “cool part of the internet,” as those spaces generally operate even further into the shadows than 4chan historically has.
Senior John Martin said, “I personally don’t use 4chan, but I associate with a lot of people who do use it on a semi-regular basis.”
Martin described 4chan users as being often “terminally online” and said those individuals likely felt the impact of the hack very strongly.
“People who use it a lot and make it a big part of their personality are definitely very strongly affected by this because it’s a foundation that they trust,” Martin said. “A loss of trust for those people in particular is definitely a big deal, but if you’re just a normal person living life, it probably won’t even be a blip on your radar.”
Martin went on to describe 4chan as a “containment site” that keeps unruly users occupied with an insular extremist culture and off of more mainstream sites.
“4chan has always been a place that’s been known for its right-wing ideologies, but there’s also a certain level of inherent absurdism that comes with 4chan in itself, because people aren’t going to take 4chan as seriously as they might take a cultural shift in Twitter [now X] or Facebook,” Martin said. “It’s more of a mainstream-ification of the ideas that exist on 4chan and some circles.”
X has shifted toward the political right in the wake of President Donald Trump’s advisor and tech billionaire Elon Musk acquiring the website, according to PBS. Despite this seeming alignment of overall user trends, Davisson drew a contrast between 4chan and X in terms of how they operate.
“X is more influenced and run by its algorithm than its culture … That’s complicated as well, and its algorithm is broken,” Davisson said. “Whereas 4chan is one of a series of sites that prides itself on having very little algorithmic control. It really is determined by user behavior, so if nobody’s reacting to something, it gets deleted. If people are reacting to it, it moves up or moves down. The algorithm is so incredibly simple that it’s not attempting to push behavior. The algorithm is responding to behavior, whereas on X … it’s broken, so it’s got little phantoms inside of it and zombies, but it still is a push algorithm as opposed to a responsive algorithm.”
According to 4chan’s statement following the site’s relaunch, the vulnerabilities that allowed the hack to happen in the first place included a shortage of developers and an overall lack of advertising revenue.
“Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services,” according to the statement. “Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade.”
Cybersecurity Department Chair Wei Lu said he believes a hack like this may happen again on 4chan in the future. He pointed out the hack likely only took about a year to complete as evidence of the fact the site’s security resources are lacking.
“It’s an easy target … Sometimes hackers, they can stay about 10 years to get into your system,” Lu said.
Lu added he thinks it is unlikely 4chan will be able to significantly upgrade its security in the near future.
“They don’t have [the] resource[s] to do this kind of improvement,” Lu said. “It’s expensive right now, if you employ your security team and do some investigation about what happened behind like this. You’ll pay at least $200,000 to a team. It’s not like you just pay $1,000 bucks and then you get it fixed.”
While 4chan was down, screenshots floated around online of what was alleged to be the parts of the site’s source code and moderator logins. Lu said he does not feel the leaked login information poses any real, unique threat to the individual moderators or the site as a whole.
“[Moderators] can simply switch to another email after this security breach or the data leak,” Lu said. “If I’m a moderator for this website, I don’t worry about that. I don’t think email leaking is a main concern in this case, because [hackers] have other ways to figure out your information.”
Martin echoed the belief that 4chan will be hacked again.
“As long as 4chan maintains a place in culture as this bastion of certain ideologies, there are going to be enemies out there who will be looking to hack it or just people who want to hack it for funsies,” Martin said. “The nature of the troll, as someone who has met and understood trolls to a certain degree, is that their ideology is whatever would bother the most people.”
In other words, Martin agreed with Davisson’s point about the underlying core of 4chan and why it has persisted through 22 years of trolling and trials.
“If the hack is based on an ideology, it’s the ideology of being annoying to others,” Martin said.
Charlotte King can be contacted at
cking@kscequinox.com
