My background with 4chan
Why am I interested in analyzing 4chan racism? One reason is that I have loved 4chan in the past, and I still love some aspects of it. Another is that I have a long-standing interest in combating racism. Discussion on the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s was dominated by "forum" or "bulletin board" sites. To contribute to discussion, you had to pick a user name and register with the site, and then use that name whenever you made posts. You could attach images to posts; however, you did so by first storing the image on some other site, and then just putting the URLs of the thumbnails and the full images in your bulletin board post. 4chan was different for two reasons. First, it was an anonymous board: you could post anytime, without registering and without picking a user name, and you could either add comments to threads or start threads yourself. Second, it was an " imageboard ": you could easily attach any image to any post you...