4CHAN has burst into the public consciousness as the web forum responsible for the biggest celebrity nude pictures leak in history — so why do we know so little about it?
Unnervingly, this anonymous online network has had a huge influence on global culture for years, as well as being at the centre of some unsavoury internet scandals.
The site was created by a gawky 15-year-old from New York called Christopher Poole, known by the username moot.
He was inspired by Japanese forum 2channel (or “2ch”) and offshoot Futaba Channel (or “2chan”).
The teenager wanted to combine 2chan’s anime culture with the community feel of another forum he visited regularly, that of comedy site Something Awful, according to Daily Dot.
4chan was brilliantly simple in format, Technology Review observed, with users able to post content to one of two message boards — /a/ for anime and /b/ for everything else.
There are now many more boards, but /b/ remains the most popular, originating some of the most famous and often puerile memes in internet history, from LOLcats to Rage comics to well-worn humorous gifs.
The New York Times said in 2008 that /b/ “reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall” while The Guardian observed: “Its lunatic, juvenile community is at once brilliant, ridiculous and alarming.”
There is certainly a dark side to 4chan.
Crucially, the site does not require users to register any details, so they are protected by a veil of anonymity.
In one case, the NYT reported, they took the story of a real seventh-grader who committed suicide and embellished it with made-up details about the boy killing himself over a lost iPod, going as far as photographing his grave with an iPod next to it, and prank-calling his grieving parents.
In another, rumours were circulated that a semi-famous musician was sleeping with an underage Florida teenager. She was then the subject of prank phone calls and further vicious stories, prompting one of the first serious public discussions of cyberbullying .
Other 4chan boards now include /k/, for “weapons, armour, and other myriad military technology”, and /h/, for anime porn.
One of the most popular memes from the site (originated on its /v/ video game board) is the Rickroll, wherein the “rickroller” tricks the “rickrollee” into watching the music video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
More worrying elements include Pedobear, a meme of a cute-looking bear which, the joke goes, is a mascot for paedophiles.
There have been numerous incidents of hoax hashtags, similar to the one a 4chan user tried to circulate on the site following the nude pictures leak encouraging women to strip in solidarity with Jennifer Lawrence.
4chan is also known for Google pranking, in which users search for agreed-upon terms in an attempt to have them “trend” on Google — terms which have included a swastika and the phrase “lol n****rs”.
It has also been known for email hacks (on anyone from Sarah Palin to fatally shot black teenager Trayvon Martin), news hoaxes amd “poll hacking” — skewing the results of online polls.
One benign example was when they managed to have Poole named as Time magazine’s most influential person.
It also has links to radical activist group Anonymous, stemming from a tradition of online “raids”, where users order targets unpaid pizzas or sign them up for embrassing junk mail.
Although Poole managed to rack up $20,000 in debt at one time, his often adolescent site has grown unstoppably to hold enormous power in internet culture, a precursor to popular forum Reddit, and later today’s social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.
It now has more than 22 million regular users — and the latest scandal may only see its power increase.
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