4chan: The Skeleton Key To The Rise Of Trump

[LiberalArkie]

1. Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful,” at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15-year-old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat.” And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

More (and it explains how it happened). Long Read

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump_us_58ab6156e4b0a855d1d8dfe4?dvsfa5c8i3htwqaor&amp

[KittyWampus]

1. Insofar as it signaled a willingness to pander to outright NeoNazis, 4chan might be significant.

But that's about it.

[LiberalArkie]

2. Anonymous came from them and so did the occupy movement

the guy fawks mask usage came from them also.

So when that group of people who themselves call themselves "basement dwellers" pick a candidate, they pick someone with their mind set and may do it again and again.

[Initech]

3. I would be willing to put good money on 4chan being behind the DU hack on election night.

Fuck them.

[LisaM]

4. This was interesting and complicated.

I thought the author could have focused more on the parallel issue of misogyny during the election. He talks about misogyny and he talks about 4chan members identifying with Trump, but I don't think he lands enough on the issue of their hating a woman candidate (or maybe his own discomfort with a woman president). I also thought he could have dived a lot deeper into the Gamergate connection.

His reference to the Beats caught my attention since I just finished a biography of Kerouac and the author dwelt a lot on Kerouac's (and others') misogyny.