#anti4chan

[burn4chaninitiate-blog]

[palomahgomez]

Week 13: Anonymity on 4chan

Anonymity is great and all. I think it creates a space for pure, uncensored self-expression. We all need a space where we truly have freedom of speech, without judgement that is linked to a username, ultimately connecting it to our profiles and faces. 

With 4Chan, not only are you protected behind a screen but you are completely detached from your post. But what happens when this is taken too far? What happens when the freedom to express has no cap, thus creating damage? In the same way that people will use this anonymity for the greater of good, they would also use it for the worse of expressions, creating some serious damage both online and offline. As Fernando Alfonso III states in his article, 

The Daily Dot - Now 10 years old, 4chan is the most important site you never visit: “ The community he built holds immense power. It’s capable of bringing animal abusers to justice and giving the world its most beloved inside jokes and despicable online traditions. The site's memes have spawned multimillion-dollar companies and resurrected entertainment careers. Yet for all the good 4chan has done, it's the pornography, obscene language, and ethically bankrupt pranks that have made it infamous.”

Another example of the worst that has materialised in real life from is when “...4chan users tried, semi- successfully, to convince teenage Justin Bieber fans to slit their wrists, then post their own nudes publicly on Twitter.”

It is down right horrific to know characters on an online social platform from anonymous profiles (not credible even by a name) would convince impressionable teenagers to endanger themselves. This gives 4chan a bad reputation, yet millions of users log onto this site daily creating havoc with no evident remorse. I presume that this continual damage has to do with the fact that their is no face to the case (as the saying goes, “no face no case”). I don't believe that this is one of the outcomes that Poole anticipated when he created this platform. Why don’t they just shut down 4chan? Yes, the site will lose a lot of possibly great interactions and creations, but the world will benefit greater from the shutting down of a toxic environment of 4chan. Or maybe some more rules and regulations can be created in order of regulating the material that circulate through 4chan.