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For the lulz?: Bigotry in moral panic discourse on 4chan’s Random – /b/
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Popular Culture Association, Bostom, MA
April 11, 2012
My name is Vyshali Manivannan, and I will be talking about lulz and bigotry in moral panic discourse on 4chan’s Random – /b/ board. In the interest of time I’m going to focus on logics of misogyny as evident in threads representative of if not generalizable to the board. This being about misogyny and 4chan, this presentation will be rife with offensive language and imagery, so be forewarned.
[1] On June 15, 2008, a user on 4chan’s Random – /b/ board identified herself as a “femanon” and posted an erotic photograph of herself. This post catalyzed the institution of wordfilters that derogated the poster, the first and most significant being “femanon” wordfiltering to “cumdumpster.” The post was then temporarily stickied to the first page, and the user was banned for having authored it. Casual users might assume that the original poster was the victim of the cruel, misogynistic humor popularly ascribed to /b/. [2] However, the ensuing replies indicate a rationale more closely connected with the collective’s hive-mind, anti-normative ethos. To insiders, the cumdumpster wordfilter existed as a retaliatory measure against declarations perceived as self-centered and attention-seeking. Substantive responses in this thread tacitly linked such declarations with “attention-whoring” and “newfaggotry,” or a display of a demonstrable lack of knowledge of the culture by a new or casual user, or “newfag.” One user aptly summarized what anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has termed the anti-celebrity, anti-leader ethic of Anonymous: (quote) “The fact that you introduce yourself as “femanon” proves that you are an attention whore. True anon has no gender.”
Users who employ personal disclosure as a bid for attention or to bolster a false sense of self-importance, termed “camwhores,” are generally viewed as outsiders who fail to understand this ethic. Exclusionary tactics include dismissive humor [3], shock images [4], and flaming in the form of bigoted rhetoric like “get the fuck out woman,” “attention whore,” or “dumb twat,” [5] or images [6] such as this demotivational made of this camwhore. /b/ users, or “/b/tards,” perceive this particular brand of outsider as part of the [7] (quote) “cancer that is killing /b/,” or the symptoms responsible for /b/’s decline in quality. While their success may be questionable, such exclusionary tactics constitute “chemo” for redressing the cancer, [8] testing participants’ ability to conform to the board’s anti-normative dynamic as sensitivity and outrage are the earmarks of an outsider while creative uses of offensive discourse [9] distinguish an insider. By this logic, users who ascribe to a normative ethos and unnecessarily identify as femanon—newfag behavior in and of itself—would be shamed off the board by the cumdumpster wordfilter.
[10] Any identity aspect is fair game once revealed; however, I will be focusing on /b/’s apparent misogyny as exemplary of its moral panic discourse. First, I will articulate the link between lulz and misogynistic discourse on /b/. Next, I will briefly examine media coverage of 4chan and the emic reaction to that coverage. Finally, I will extract principles of bigotry as a form of self-governance through examining two camwhores who were singled out for transgressing /b/’s identity politics. While this ostensibly occurred “for the lulz,” it is significant that such levels of trolling occurred during spikes in media coverage of 4chan. As the media moralizes excessively about the corruptive potential of 4chan’s architecture, it increases 4chan’s visibility and popularity. Newfags arrive and skew the site’s dynamic through whiteknighting [11], moralfagging [12], and treating the space as though it exists under the aegis of social media. Thus, /b/tards implement ever-harsher measures to police atomization of the collective, sustain its anti-celebrity ethic, and regulate content quality.
[13] 4chan was created in October 2003 and is the largest English-language image board and the flagship of the Western *chans, with over 20 million unique visitors monthly. Like the other *chans, 4chan is characterized by extreme ephemerality and anonymity. It lacks an archive and expired content is completely removed from its servers. Content refreshes extremely rapidly—usually within minutes—on Random – /b/, which receives approximately 30% of 4chan’s total traffic. Consequently, users must rely on collective memory and lurking to achieve /b/tard status and understand how to appropriately participate. The site’s ethic is also evident in that threads archived on other sites are based on and reflect user consensus. 4chan also lacks the option of registration, and according to Bernstein et al, the default username “Anonymous,” although modifiable, is left unmodified by over 90% of users. Other identifying information is also eschewed. Just as image-based identifiers are attributed to camwhores, users who adopt fluid or fixed username identities are derided as “namefags” and “tripfags” who fail to understand the purpose of on the site.
[14] Random – /b/ operates under few if any rules, and lacks strict moderation. It receives over 700,000 unique visitors per day as of 2010. Its users are contrary [15], antagonistic [16], and deviant [17], but often in unexpected or clever ways. It is this cleverness that is perceived as being stifled by the cancer. However, /b/’s posting mechanism inadvertently facilitates cancer, as it links visibility with participation as new posts, which do not have to be substantive, “bump” threads closer to the first page. Newfags who misunderstand the site’s ethic participate in and thus bump cancerous threads up. Moreover, since these threads are eventually permanently deleted, there is no substantial repository of threads that denigrate newfaggotry and treatment of 4chan as a social media platform. [18] Thus, newfags seem to defer to media portrayals and the normative ethos of other sites in participating on 4chan.
Lulz is represented by the mainstream media as the aimless malice of a hive-mind of trolls, performed for sheer amusement. This portrayal results in scores of newfags posting Facebook links and insisting /b/ troll someone, when /b/ is not your personal army [19]. At the same time, lulz often has a lasting impact on targets when it is less prankish and more life-ruining. [20] As such, it serves as the ultimate chemo when done to punish transgressions such as the attention-seeking behaviors of Martini-chan and Fatty-chan.
Spikes of newfaggotry and other cancerous behavior may be directly linked to media coverage and moral panic around 4chan involvement in offsite raids. Mainstream media “discovered” 4chan during Project Chanology, [21] Anonymous’s attack on the Church of Scientology. [22] 4chan’s publicity subsequently rose as Anonymous rigged Time’s Person of the Year Poll in 2009, defended WikiLeaks and anti-censorship causes in 2010, and trolled 11-year-old camwhore Jessi Slaughter that same year for her celebrity ethic. The language used in this coverage ranged from admiring to patronizingly critical. One Anon noted that, due to mainstream media coverage (quote) “there will always be more non-4channers than 4channers,” necessitating a look at the media’s rhetoric itself. I will briefly look at two sources Anonymous considers particularly lulzy, Fox News and Gawker, in 2007 and 2010 respectively.
According to Fox in 2007, /b/ is not only an “Internet hate machine” [23] but “hackers on steroids, treating the web like a real life video game. Sacking websites, invading MySpace accounts and disrupting innocent people’s lives.” Fox likens Anonymous to “domestic terrorists” on “secret websites.” The report misrepresented the 2006 bomb threat on football stadiums as legitimate, when spot research would have quickly exposed the threat as a hoax. Additionally, the pranks on Habbo Hotel, [24] represented as senseless, were responding to Habbo’s racist admins who banned black avatars; accordingly, Anonymous donned black avatars and blocked access to the virtual pool. Anonymous also, apparently, [25] blows up vans.
In its treatment of 4chan in 2010 [26], Gawker stated that sometimes “the Internet beats up on an 11-year-old girl [Jessi Slaughter], posting her address, phone number and making her cry. Bad.” Gawker concluded that 4chan had gone too far, linking the lulzy attacks with allegations of Jessi’s involvement with the lead singer of Blood on the Dance Floor. However, Anonymous was provoked by a video posted on /b/, in which Jessi talks tough but admits to putting on a hardcore, sexually explicit persona so that people would be interested in her, then denies being a poser on the same breath. This attention-seeking behavior is very similar to the cancer policed on /b/, suggesting that was the phenomenon at which the lulz was aimed.
Misrepresenting 4chan by recasting its motivations within the normative, dominant value system is characteristic of a moral panic, as these and other publications do through stylizing rhetoric and exaggerated binaries. 4chan was primarily described as a “hive of scum and villainy,” Internet fame and masturbatory material, but contextualizing it within a dominant value system renders it impenetrable if not outright evil, so that its nuances are lost on newfags. For instance, [27] “tits or GTFO” does not seem essential to participation, in the same sense that revealing one’s gender is seen as inessential. Rather, it is meant to expel attention-seeking femanon. Even the iterations of the phrase [28] demonstrate a desire for original content over an individual’s unwarranted self-importance.
This brings us to moral panics within online communities. [29] Stanley Cohen first defined a media moral panic in 1972 as the moment an event and its actors emerge as threatening to social values and interests; after this the media portrays it in exaggerated, stereotyping language and eventually the threat is dealt with or disappears, only to resurface at a later date. In his 2006 study of alternative identity construction on Usenet, Baker determined that a moral panic response in an online community constituted (quote) “the efforts of a particular group to exert collective moral control over another group or person.” He examined the moral panic occurring around a homophobic troll, “Macho Joe,” and found that flaming was the strategy most commonly deployed in order to both recast the threat within the dominant value system and excise it from the community. Incidentally, a return to the status quo occurred after Macho Joe was exposed as a troll who was himself gay and indulging in homophobic discourse.
Similarly, detractors of femanon on /b/ perceive themselves as having the moral high ground through providing quality control [30],as suggested by this Anon in 2007. The level of concern towards the cancer is volatile and fluctuates depending on user presence, resulting in strategies similar to those adopted in Usenet’s moral panic discourse: ignoring the issue and awaiting its demise; responding with shock images; making crude requests to repel the poster; and, when none of this works, trolling for the lulz.
[31] Case in point 1: in 2007, Martini-chan posted increasingly titillating images of herself despite warning flames. As the thread filled with cancerous requests for more pictures, one Anon reminded participants that “Anonymous does not like or respect camwhores. We treat them like the attention sluts they are, fap, and then ignore them. Welcome to /b/.” This and similar messages were spammed in the thread. Finally, when Martini-chan performed Anon’s lulzy request to urinate into a martini glass and drink it, Anonymous retaliated by screencapping the photographs, locating her MySpace, and linking them to her boyfriend’s account.
[32] And Case 2: In 2010, Fatty-chan posted pornographic images of herself only to be greeted with animosity despite other recent cancer threads that had met with more muted criticism. She was insulted and made to cry, messages with photos of her breasts and genitalia were linked to her Facebook acquaintances, and a new thread was started with this opening post, a kind of declaration of war on camwhores. Both threads were archived based on user-consensus, and both occurred during spikes of media coverage castigating the site without delving into its operating principles. Along with the cumdumpster wordfilter in 2008, these cases suggest that lulz garnered from camwhores is paradigmatic of the Anonymous ethic: avoid egocentrism, avoid identity disclosure, remain under the radar.
Like the moral panic on Usenet, /b/tards have adopted lulzy tactics to police unacceptable behavior and recast the threat within the dominant value system. Potential camwhores, witnessing the carnage following Martini-chan and Fatty-chan, were briefly silenced [33]. As such, these threads are exemplary of the waves of crisis and resolution that have occurred between 2007 and 2010—though this is not to say the cancer did not exist before then nor that it has disappeared. [34] Ultimately, as mass media was creating a moral panic about sites built around anonymity and alternate accountability systems, /b/ was creating a moral panic to exclude the new users who consequently arrived with a false understanding of the site’s (quote) “egoless, identityless” ethic. /b/’s moral panic is in some ways a response to eternal September: the Usenet-originating belief that an endless influx of newfags will forever ruin the quality of a site. Thus, /b/’s misogynistic discourse does not indicate widespread prejudice, but instead, users’ desire to maintain the anti-normativity, exclusivity, and anti-celebrity and anti-leader ethic of the site, and, above all, to preserve its creativity, all of which have been threatened by the media-incited influx of new or casual users.
