This is a story about a little website called 4chan. Throughout the years it has gained fame and notoriety for a number of things Most notably the inception of the hacking group known as "anonymous", various murderers posting their victims, bringing the idea of memes into the mainstream consciousness and violent, hilarious, ridiculous, tasteless, racist narcissism and self loathing.
The cultural impact of the website has spanned the globe and affected every single type of media either through deliberate political pressure or accidentally through numbers.
First and foremost, for those who are faint of heart or have simply heard too many horror stories to ever visit the website let me cover some basics for you. 4chan is an image board, that is to say, its a type of forum where you have to start a new chain of posts with an image. The main appeal of it for most people is the fact that you do not register an account of 4chan and in fact on the post popular board, /b/, you can't post with a username at all. This creates a type of discourse were each person is judged based on the content of their language rather than forum prestige or internet fame.
Originally the website was dedicated primarily to anime, however over the years its become more of a melting pot of many different categories and people. At present there are many different boards from /tv/ - television to /pol/ - politics. That being said though, the influence of anime is still very present and most of the boards still have their own group of users who compliment every post with an image of an anime character, both as a way of identifying themselves from the anonymous masses and showing their feelings or reactions to things others have said.
Politically the website has generally been right wing over the years however this really didn't come into a serious fruition until an event known as as tumblr wars. Contrary to popular belief these raids were not started by 4chan but were in fact a hostile act originating from tumblr in an attempt to punish the 4chan community for being "Racist, misogynistic and pure evil" unfortunately though attempting to bother 4chan users by posting inflaming or off topic things is not very effective as the culture of the website already embraces the idea of thick skinned arguing where the best of the best are the ones who manage to bother people, which despite being a banal pass time takes a level of skill and practice that those who do manage to do it are praised by the community and in fact, haven't disrupted at all and have instead, contributed to business as usual. This cannot be said about tumblr another website for sharing images, which is traditionally left wing, the culture there is much more concerned with safe spaces, and how much words can hurt. Needless to say this was a bad move, tactically on the part of tumblr as 4chan is historically known for retaliating to pellet guns with nukes and napalm, and the apparent weakness of the ideologues on tumblr was the primary strength of the trolls on 4chan. Unfortunately, unlike in physics where opposites attract and annihilate each other the two websites fed on the battle, generating lots and lots of political sympathy for their own respective sides.
The results of the publicity and political divisiveness around the conflict resulted in two major events for each websites politics. Tumblr utilized the enmity with the denizens of /pol/ and /b/ to further justify their identity politics and thought policing ideology. The political power was given to these otherwise fringe ideologues via the positive press they received by being victimized by 4chan which is notorious for bullying people to suicide. This type of politics became suddenly much more mainstream on the internet justifying people into actively trying to ruin videogames for everyone.
#gamergate is an ongoing mess which can only be described as a disappointing clusterfuck. It is the result of opportunist professional victims like anita sarkeesian lashing out against what they perceive to be their enemy ; average males who play video-games. I could get really deep into this topic and I think, honestly, my next post probably will but at the moment I will only skim my admittedly biased view of the top. The political ideologues of the new neo third wave femenist movement are actively attempting to censor videogames and although, the main controversy of gamergate has passed it is an ongoing political campaign and they are slowly winning. People they dislike are slandered so ferociously that for fear of upsetting these people videogame companies are complicit and refuse to work with any person who has shown to have been in open disagreement with any of them.
Donald Trump owes a large portion of his support to presidency to this weird interaction between politics, greaseballs, trolls, and videogames. If it weren't for the backlash from 4chans /pol/ board and the hate and rage fueled campaigning by its users we may very well be in another Clinton presidency . This sort of pillage and salt the earth tactic is very typical of 4chan, though it would be remiss of me to attribute 100% of trumps presidency to 4chan I still believe they played a large part in giving a reality tv show host the nuclear launch codes.