Free Republic

The word “troll” no longer conjures up a dumpy little plastic figure with brightly coloured hair: nor a monster from The Lord of the Rings. If you live even a part of your life online, you’ll know that trolls today are better known as the angry and usually anonymous commenters on web forums, whose aim is to shock, offend, annoy or upset fellow users. Trolling made headlines this week when Sean Duffy, a young man from Reading, was given 18 weeks’ imprisonment for defacing Facebook tributes to four dead teenagers whom he had never met. The abuse was vile: on...

Looks like someone, probably a 4chan member, is having some fun at the Union's expense. Note who is "supporting" the Union Protestors. . .

Police in the US have issued a bizarre warning to parents about a ‘paedophile’ cartoon bear that was created by a website as in internet joke. Pedobear was created on 4chan, a chaotic, largely unregulated network of messageboards which has spawned some of the internet’s most famous virals and jokes. It is used by some users to mock people in internet chat rooms by suggesting that they are paedophiles or have said something slightly inappropriate about children. Now police in San Luis Obispo in California appear to have misunderstood the internet trend – or meme - and have warned parents...

Love it or hate it, you can thank 4chan for countless online phenomena like lolcats, the ubiquitous photos of cats combined with humorous text, often in "kitty speak." The image-based Internet forum has been the breeding ground for some of the Web's most well-known inside jokes, but it's still unknown or mysterious to many. But thanks to the Smoking Gun, a site dedicated to unearthing court and government documents, we now know a little more about how the site works directly from the mouth of its founder, Christoper Poole. Poole delivered testimony, just posted by The Smoking Gun, in the...

Anonislamichan — April 21, 2010 — With your constant threats directed at popular public figures the extent of your anger has been made clear to us, the evilness of your intent breaks through your guise as a religion of peace. Anonymous has therefore decided that your religion should be attacked in the same way that you feel compelled to attack others, for the safety of the accused individuals, for the good of mankind, for the lulz. We shall expel your presence from the Internet and systematically dismantle what remains. We acknowledge you as a serious opponent, and we are prepared...

On the Internet, he's a god. In real life, he's an out-of-work 21-year-old, $20,000 in debt, living in his mom's Westchester apartment. Meet Christopher Poole, known to his online fans as "moot," the mind behind 4chan.org, one of the busiest - and strangest - discussion boards on the Web. Poster child, perhaps, of the Internet economy, where you can influence the lives of millions and still not cover the rent. 4chan.org's users, and there are, on average, 5 million a month, engage in mindless, usually vile, nonstop banter that often percolates beyond the service itself with books, political kerfuffles and...

Christopher Poole, better known to the internet as 4chan’s moot, spoke at TED 2010’s “Provocation� session. moot, 21, was revealed as 4chan’s creator by the Wall Street Journal in 2008. He said in an interview with TIME on the same day his identity was disclosed that his “personal private life is very separate from (his) Internet life … There’s a firewall in between.� Which is fitting for a young man backed by an army known to the internet at large as “anonymous,� based in a community known primarily for it’s nameless, anything goes menu of pornography, schadenfraude and extraordinarily crass...

Oxford, N.C. — Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby's bedroom in his mother's Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall. But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

Web surfers who used Google.com to search for information on President Barack Obama on Tuesday afternoon were presented with a racial slur. The slur originated from Obama's Wikipedia entry, after a user had removed all content in Obama's entry and replaced it with three repeated words: a derogatory term for African-Americans. Wikipedia.com's revision history records show that slur was only live for two minutes...

... In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.” Today the Internet...