4chan

As an adult-content creator with a large following on the internet, Isla David has dealt with trolls before. Usually, her work combatting online bad actors involves her trying to take down photos of herself that have been posted elsewhere without her permission, such as a photo for an ad for “horny MILFs in your area” that she’s been trying to get removed for years. But she’s also used to trolls editing her image without her consent. “They’re either subtracting clothes, editing my waist, editing the size of my chest…

Shocking pretty much no one, a new report claims the explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift emerged from the internet’s most infamous cesspool: 4chan. In findings shared with Rolling Stone, the research firm Graphika said it sourced the images to a particular message board community on 4chan that basically made a game out of coming up with prompts for AI image generators that would skirt safeguards and create graphic images of famous people. (The tech publication 404 similarly traced the images back to…

Photo: ako photography / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock)A series of AI-generated images of Taylor Swift in suggestive and pornographic situations are causing an uproar on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Though some of the images have been taken down, others remain on the platform. Swift’s army of fans have embarked on a campaign to bury the images by flooding the platform with their responses. What to Watch For: Taylor Swift's "Midnights" What to Watch For: Taylor Swift's "Midnights" vinyl salesAt least one of…

It’s been just over a year since lone gunman Peyton Gendron travelled over 200 miles and open fired in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York last May. Now, the families of those wounded and murdered in the attack want to hold social media companies accountable with a wrongful death lawsuit because the gunman encountered racistGreat Replacement conspiracy theories online.Russian Court Says Meta Is "Extremist Organization"The lawsuit was filed yesterday in the New York Supreme Court in Buffalo, and names Meta, Instagram,…

The Archive of Our Own—the largest digital library for fanfiction currently operating, and one of the highest-trafficked sites in the world—was temporarily unavailable after it experienced a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack from a hacker group calling itself “Anonymous Sudan.” Ao3 reported the outage early on the morning of July 10 and had restored service by around noon EST July 11.Teyonah Parris and John Boyega on Working With Jamie Foxx | io9 InterviewWhile Anonymous Sudan is posing as a…

According to the cross-section of bans provided to New York, which were issued in the days after the Buffalo mass shooting, 21 bans were imposed for violating US law. Some of those were, as 4chan pointed out to the Attorney General’s Office, for counseling for further terror attacks. The posts encouraged fellow 4chan users to kill politicians, journalists, law enforcement officials, Jewish and Black people, and to target Pride events. In practice, however, the majority of calls for violence on 4chan do not result in bans.…

Elmore says the goal is to force reform.“We can’t bring the victims of this lawsuit back, but we can make sure that no other families have to file this kind of lawsuit,” he says. No families deserve to be members of this unenviable club, Elmore says.The lawsuit essentially takes aim at the full journey that brought Gendron from being a regular American teen to becoming a violent white supremacist—one equipped with the means and intention of massacring as many Black people as possible. They point to platforms like Facebook…

Last fall, just blocks from my apartment in Cambridge, Mass., a gang of neo-Nazis gathered in Harvard Square on a Sunday afternoon. Videos showed a group of masked white men shouting, spitting, cursing homophobic slurs and chest-thumping at students. They were part of the Nationalist Social Club, a local neo-Nazi outfit, nicknamed the “131 Crew,” as if it were a sneaker collective and not a gang.In researching the rise of the fascist movement in the United States, I have found troubling parallels to 1930s Italy and…

Kawakami “was afraid that Nishimura could be arrested by the police,” says Sei, author of the upcoming book The World of 2 Channel. Sei recently interviewed Kawakami. “So he dismissed Nishimura as a director.” The two, however, remained friends, he says.In November 2014, according to Sei’s reporting, Dwango bought out Nishimura’s stake in Niconico for an undisclosed amount. In January 2015, Poole announced his retirement from 4chan. By July, Nishimura was in talks to buy the website. In those conversations was Good Smile…

Good Smile, one of the world’s most popular toy companies, reportedly acted as the brace for one of the internet’s worst cesspools, financially backing 4chan. The site has gone on to facilitate harassment campaigns, racism, misogyny, and homophobia while being a vortex for internet conspiracy theories.Why is the Dancing Baby an NFT?Wired reported on Wednesday that, based on partnership agreement documents, Japanese toy company Good Smile has financially backed 4chan for nearly eight years. The merch provider is known for…