The month after Nishimura took over, Chris Harper-Mercer posted his intent to carry out an attack at a school in the northwest to 4chan’s incel board, /r9k/. “I was always suspicious that he could afford 4chan,” he says. “I borrowed money,” Nishimura answered.įredrick Brennan, the 8chan founder who later left the site and repudiated its toxic influence, says he was intrigued when Nishimura bought the site.
When Nishimura held an AMA on 4chan soon after his takeover became public, amid a torrent of racist comments, one user asked how he financed the sale. In September 2015, nine months after 4chan’s founder said he would be exiting the site, Poole announced that he was handing over the reins of one of the most popular sites on the internet to Nishimura. Nishimura had lost 2channel a year earlier when it was seized by its registrar, Jim Watkins, who would go on to snap up 4chan’s even-less-moderated rival, 8chan (now 8kun). There was only one person who knew as much as, if not more than, Poole about running such an imageboard: Hiroyuki Nishimura. “But it certainly hasn’t provided me with wealth.” “4chan has given me some amount of notoriety,” Poole told Rolling Stone at the time. In early 2015, just as 4chan was wrestling with its burgeoning toxic identity, Poole suddenly exited his 12-year-old creation. In 2014, a more coherent, and conservative, ideology started to take hold on 4chan: The Gamergate harassment campaign against game journalists and women game developers began to define the channel-/b/ and /pol/, in particular-as more angry and reactionary than it had been previously.
(At the same time, 4chan users reported their fellow users who, they feared, could commit acts of violence.) But 4chan also had a persistent problem with child sexual abuse material, while its users used their anonymity to make threats against their schools. There was a mischievous streak: Its users harassed white supremacist radio host Hal Turner and hacked Sarah Palin’s email. Over its first decade of life, 4chan defined and shaped troll culture. The website quickly grew, branching into all manner of internet culture, hardcore pornography, news, and, eventually, the politics board, /pol/. In the early days, 4chan users could share anime on /a/, and everything else on /b/, the random board.
In 2003, looking to replicate the vibe of the Futaba board, from a 2channel spinoff, he grabbed the open source code underpinning the website, translated it, and officially opened 4chan. They shared their finds on Something Awful’s Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse forum.Īmongst those early devotees was Christopher Poole. On the Something Awful message boards, where a particularly edgy brand of internet humor was taking shape, a group of users became enthralled with the anime popular on 2channel (and its offshoot, 2chan). While the message boards were largely inscrutable to English-speaking audiences, they had a small cult following stateside.
Nishimura was the celebrity face of Niconico until he left in 2013.
Within a decade, Nishimura became the bad boy of Japanese media, cultivating a career as a self-help guru and even inking a deal with Japanese telecommunications giant Dwango to set up the hugely successful video-sharing site Niconico. That freedom would prove wildly popular in Japan. It’s where they are allowed to say things they don’t need to take responsibility for,” Nishimura would tell The Japan Times years later.
“It’s where idiots can be the idiots they want to be. But Nishimura offered users something rare and exciting: the freedom to be completely anonymous. The Japanese-language imageboard is built on several successful text-based usenet and message boards. As the United States grapples with 4chan’s toxic influence, from its role in enabling the January 6 insurrection to its alleged influence on mass shooters, its clear that attempts to hold someone accountable and perhaps even reduce its role in radicalizing young men will not be possible without a better grasp of its corporate structure.įrom his dorm room in Arkansas in 1999, Hiroyuki Nishimura created 2channel.