Who owns 4chan?

[Ohio Joe]

Over the past 19 years, the imageboard 4chan has been tied to Gamergate, the inception of QAnon, the incubation of a particular brand of online racism, and a raft of domestic terror attacks that have killed scores of people.

Tragically, references and tributes to 4chan are littered throughout a 180-page screed believed to be written by the 18-year-old who is alleged to have shot 13 people in a predominately Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. All 10 victims killed in the massacre were Black. Just this week, 4chan’s users spread transphobic misinformation about the identity of the school shooter who killed 19 children and two adults in an elementary school in Uvdale, Texas, that quickly reached the feeds of a right-wing member of Congress.

Even as the imageboard continues to rise in infamy, a question lingers: Who actually owns 4chan?

For years, its ownership has been murky: Invented by an American, sold to a Japanese businessman in 2015, its corporate structure is largely unknown, beyond a pair of Delaware-registered corporations.

New information, shared exclusively with WIRED, provides greater detail into 4chan’s largely unpublicized relationship with a major Japanese toy firm called the Good Smile Company. Legal documents, corporate records, and interviews with those familiar with both companies show that Good Smile played a role in 4chan’s 2015 acquisition.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/who-owns-4chan/

The FBI needs to be doing some serious investigating of the 4/8chan users.

[bucolic_frolic]

1. I don't know if there is an answer

I look to past models of off the charts behavior. Thirty Years' War. The Black Death. Berzerker invasions. I doubt they can be stopped by pulling their channel. They'll just find another or go into code or send emails or write letters. It has to burn itself out. They have to realize its effect on their lives, for themselves.

[intrepidity]

2. I think Jim and Ron Watkins are the names to know

Also Fredrick Brennan

[blogslug]

3. Ugh

To summarize the article, the site is subsidized by a toy company because it's a great place to sell their line(s) of creeper anime figurines.

Also, is that site still run the way I remember: No membership accounts, every user is anonymous and all posts get automatically deleted after a short amount of time?

[Initech]

4. The problem is that 4chan has split into a ton of different variants.

There's 4chan, 8chan, 4kun, and I'm pretty sure that 8kun is where most of the extremists go. But the bad thing is if we cut them off, they'll just go and regroup somewhere else.