The Hacker Known as 4chan

About

The Hacker Known as 4chan refers to a series of memes in which people personify the website 4chan as an individual person and hacker, satirizing the mainstream media's lack of understanding on the events they reported during coverage of The Fappening in late August 2014. Another commonly seen phrase comes from a viral video of CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin discussing the hack on her show where she asks, "Who Is This 4 Chan?" and is typically used to mock news outlets for their poor internet literacy.

Origin

After the events of The Fappening, in which a hacker posted nude photographs of various celebrities onto 4chan, many news outlets rushed to report about the event, often without proper fact-checking.^[1] One such report (which has since been taken down) from the Australian branch of MTV identified the hacker as "a hacker known as 4 Chan," while the text in the article was changed to read "A hacker, known only as a user of website '4 Chan,'" later on, the original text read "A hacker known as '4 Chan' claims to not only have nude, risqué images but explicit videos …" (seen below). Due to the obvious error of identifying the hacker by the name of the site, many users on 4chan mocked the error by asking who 4chan was on the site itself.

A similar event later occurred on CNN in a report about The Fappening where an interview with Brett Larson on Brooke Baldwin's show included the line, "Who is this 4 Chan?" The report was heavily mocked for little actual knowledge on technology and 4chan, receiving nearly 1.5 million views on CNN's YouTube^[3] upload in six years (shown below).

Spread

Various screenshots pointing out the factual error identifying the hacker as "4chan" were posted to Reddit after the story broke. On September 1st, 2014, Redditor Esenix posted one such image to the /r/funny^[4] subreddit, receiving over 43,000 upvotes and 2,500 comments in six months. That same day, Redditor a89251 posted another example to the /r/4chan^[5] sub, receiving over 1,800 upvotes and 74 comments in six months.

There have been many other posts on both Reddit and 4chan portraying "4 Chan" as a hacker rather than a website, parodying or mocking mainstream media coverage. Often, these posts will take a position either for or against him, e.g. "I hope they catch that 4 Chan guy." Sometimes people will even claim to be 4 Chan e.g. "I'm 4 Chan and I have more nudes, ask me anything" (example shown below).

While the news story was being heavily reported, many /b/ users on 4chan posted any news articles that mentioned the site to the board.^[2] One article posted by The Mirror came under heavy fire for its heavily biased wording and inclusion of a poll asking if 4chan should be shut down. It was also heavily mocked for its inclusion of a picture of a hacker wearing a balaclava (seen below).

Due to the absurdity of wearing a ski mask while hacking an account and the portrayal of 4chan members reminiscent of a cartoon villain, users rapidly spread the image and it became associated with the fictional hacker.

On August 28th, 2016, YouTuber^[6] latsyrhc uploaded a video titled "the hacker known as 4chan" depicting themselves wearing a Guy Fawkes mask while listening to EDM and mocking the media's portrayal of the "hacker 4chan," receiving over 143,000 views in four years (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References