The British government is going to war with 4chan, the controversial internet message board that has been around for more than 20 years. It’s surprising that it has taken them so long. 4chan users have committed murders, propagated hoaxes and shaped much of the online right.
Since the Online Safety Act came into effect, no one at the site has responded to Ofcom’s statutory information requests or explained how 4chan will ‘comply with … safety duties about illegal content’. Officials want 4chan to get better at removing illegal content and to introduce an age-verification system. Under the new law, tech owners are legally responsible for protecting users from each other. 4chan will be fined £20,000 a day until the nastiest place on the internet can sort itself out.
You can see why Ofcom is going after 4chan. A number of American killers have been found to have had a 4chan account, while parts of the QAnon MAGA conspiracy began as a joke on its many forums. Pizzagate, the idea that Hillary Clinton was running a paedophile ring from the basement of a Washington DC restaurant, started on 4chan. In December 2016, a 28-year-old man shot up the pizzeria with an assault rifle. It later transpired that the building did not even have a basement.
But after lurking on the site for a few years, I’ve concluded that 4chan’s existence is a net good. It is home to some of the most honest and interesting people on the internet. If you want to understand the plight of our most disfranchised young men, put down the newspaper columns and brace yourself for a scroll through 4chan’s busiest message boards.
Much is objectionable. The default ideology on the ‘Politically Incorrect’ board sits somewhere between Goebbels and Stalin, and odious things are often said about women. But one might also encounter a PhD student stuck in minimum-wage shift work despite being ‘the most informed Husserl scholar on the North American continent’; the men wishing they could lie down in supermarket aisles or stage schizophrenic breakdowns to escape their financial responsibilities; the singletons who download Tinder and find themselves getting attention only from robots. 4chan’s average user has nowhere else to go.
The site can be surprising. It has become an accidental refuge for self-education. Aesthetic criticism is absent from most contemporary art schools but it can be found on 4chan’s ‘Artwork/Critique’ board, where users make fun of each other in the interest of becoming better draughtsmen. The website’s literary section loves Melville, Joyce and Pynchon, and users earnestly compile reading lists to share with each other. Some have clubbed together to produce a 700-page postmodern novel called Hypersphere.
To be on 4chan is to bear witness to a sense of mischief that has almost entirely slipped from contemporary culture. Scrolling through the site can feel like reading an unedited Private Eye, if it were much further to the right and dotted with pornographic Japanese cartoons. Some of the jokes really are hilarious. Users once convinced Apple users to microwave their iPhones for rapid charging.
4chan users have committed murders, propagated hoaxes and shaped much of the online right
In response to Britain’s attempts to impose order, 4chan’s lawyers have insisted that because it is headquartered in the US, it is not subject to foreign legislation. Even if the owners were minded to follow our laws, the site’s speed and anonymity make it difficult to moderate. The Online Safety Act has been designed in such a way that it is difficult for smaller out-of-the-way sites to comply. An established website – one with a board of directors, a robust system of moderators and a sideline in selling user data – might opt to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to an external age-verification service. 4chan, which is funded mainly through banner advertising, has no way to comply.
Users find 4chan’s culture exhilarating, yet many in the mainstream press seem unable to understand why – or even what it is. A CNN reporter once referred to ‘the notorious hacker known as 4chan’. Many people would find the cruder, nastier elements of the site alarming, but for 4chan users, that just makes the joke even funnier. The truth is that plenty of mad and dangerous people also have Facebook and X accounts.
Ofcom has the power to order British internet service providers to ban the site entirely. But alternatives will spring up. Leave 4chan alone, I say, and let people use it at their own risk. It may contravene the Online Safety Act. But the Online Safety Act contravenes everything that has made our online culture interesting.
Comments