As Anonymous and 4Chan go, they are a force to be reckoned with. Members of 4Chan and Anonymous have pulled off some of the most daring raids in Internet history. From changing the Time magazine “Most Influential” poll to reflect the founder of 4Chan Chris Poole, as being the top pick, to numerous raids against Disney Stars and other high profile individuals.
Members of 4Chan and Anonymous have brought people to justice, mostly animal abusers and the occasional pedophile. They have supplied Iranian Government Proxy info during the Iranian protests. Also, who could ever forget their on going war against the Church of Scientology?
4Chan and Anonymous have their own set of rules they live by. These are the coveted Rules of the Internet. They have no leader, no set hierarchy, and no membership fees. Some content does require a 4chan Gold Account to see, but we’ll get into that later.
4Chan and Anonymous does have some members who leak info and destroy plots and schemes. The people are called Internet White Knights. 4Chan can’t stand them most of the time. A lot of times White Knights will step in and ruin a perfectly good raid, they will leak the story or plans to a news source, then everything goes downhill from there.
The latest such issue happened with the popular Tech blog known as TechCrunch. YouTube account Lukeywes1234 had been banned. Now there usually isn’t a big deal about an account being banned on YouTube, however the account belonged to a kid that 4Chan had labeled a God. The user Lukeywes1234 as it turns out, was to young to have a YouTube account so, in accordance with their Terms of Service, YouTube banned the kids account. 4Chan didn’t care for excuses, in their minds, they had been wronged, deprived of LULZ, they set up their master plan.
So today is officially YouTube Porn day. The plan was to flood YouTube with a ton of porn submissions. Starting around 6 o’clock GMT. 4Chan has pulled this off in the past, and had a good laugh doing it. What makes it different this time is, a White Knight had stepped in and leaked the story to TechCrunch. The jig was up, 4Chan’s plans were blown. Now YouTube had time to get admins in place to respond to the porn flood.
While TechCrunch is a very popular Tech blog and the writer if the article MG Siegler, I am sure is a professional writer, I do have some advice. If TechCrunch could have done more investigating, and let the drama unfold, they would have had a bigger story. One of the rules of the Internet according to Anonymous is Rule# 32. “Lurk Moar, it’s never enough.” Had the TechCrunch writer lurked, he could have taken screen grabs, had more links to the hilarity and seen first hand how both sides handled the issue. But hey it’s TechCrunch. They are known for jumping on a story without ALL the facts and throwing caution to the wind.
