The racist smear campaign against Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teen shot to death last month in Florida, has reached a new level of ghoulishness. A white supremacist hacker says he's broken into Martin's email and social networking accounts, and leaked his private Facebook messages. We've been able to confirm that at least one email account that belonged to Martin was cracked.
Bronies are on the march. One of the strangest, most volatile fanbases on the internet has exploded over a tiny change to a beloved character on the children's cartoon "My Little Pony."
Forget SOPA. The biggest online intellectual property story last week was the shutdown of a website offering downloads of the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which shook the burgeoning "brony" community to its core.
Bronies (bro+pony) are adult male fans of the new series launched in 2010 based on the classic ‘80s My Little Pony toy that [spoiler] your mom secretly threw out your collection of when you went to college.
If you think bronyism sounds like something only a serious pervert living in his mother's basement would be into, you're only about 30% correct. To address your immediate question: it's not ironic. It's nerdy guys who genuinely enjoy an animated series about ponies. The show has a legitimate appeal to older audiences—high production values, snappy dialog, and a heartwarming message. But the online fan culture of bronies grew out of 4chan, so they have a computer nerd vestigial tail of Mountain Dew, anime appreciation, chronic virginity, and cyberbullying.
Bronies have their own news sites, fan forums, and even a healthy amount of fan art of ponies doing unspeakable sexual acts on Tumblr. They've had real life meet-ups, and an upcoming BronyCon in New York will feature appearances by voice actors from the show.
A number of credible music outlets — NME, Spin, and Stereogum, to name a few — are passing along a supposed long-lost Radiohead track called "Putting Ketchup in the Fridge" that has recently surfaced online. As with so many too-good-to-be-true Radiohead rumors these days, it's probably fake. [Updated below.]
More and more people are hating Facebook in increasingly effective ways, and for increasingly better reasons. Good times. Too bad it will probably do nothing to keep Facebook from transforming the internet into an unbearably bland prison-mall.
23-year-old 4chan founder Christopher Poole (aka "moot") has fashioned himself as a sort of anti-Mark Zuckerberg, favoring anonymity and a certain messiness to Facebook's domain of spotless white walls and sterile profile pics. He's made a stir again by directly attacking Facebook's approach to identity.
Among the many, many people who irk the anarchic message board 4chan, cyberbullying expert Parry Aftab is one of the most consistently despised. So it's not surprising that an anonymous internet denizen sent a SWAT team to her New Jersey home this weekend.
We're not going to actually show you five million 4chan posts, since we and all of you would likely be sent to prison for a long time. But here's a word cloud generated from 5,576,095 posts. (Click on the photo above to enlarge.)
A study by grad students at MIT produced this chart describing the average activity on 4chan over a two-week span. Those familiar with the site will not be surprised that it really livens up in the off-hours.
Tumblr, the microblogging service for the hip and with-it, is currently down. It appears that hordes from the chaotic message board 4chan are to blame. Welcome to round two of the Tumblr-4chan war!
Anyone hoping the harrowing saga of Florida 11-year-old Jessi Slaughter might have a happy ending will be sorely disappointed.
Rebecca Black, star of the hugely popular and terrible "Friday" viral video, complained to The Daily Beast today about the mean things people are saying about her on the Internet: "Those hurtful comments really shocked me," she said. "At times, it feels like I'm being cyberbullied." And this was before 4chan launched "Operation Black Friday."
What's musician/party god Andrew W.K. doing for the Grammys? Crashing anarchic image-board 4chan by "partying too hard"—that is, hanging out and answering questions, apparently. W.K. popped by the site's music board /mu/ (bearing a site-standard identity-verifying photograph) and answered a few questions over two different threads, in the process slowing the whole site down and causing brief outages. The first one, which was locked is here; the second is here.
