The internet is serious business: 4chan's /b/ board and the Lulz as alternative political discourse on the internet.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The online image and message board known as 4chan is as paradoxical as it is popular. Boasting an estimated 18 million unique monthly visitors and generating one million posts per day, the site is a locus of obscenity and bigotry, a wellspring of popular internet culture, and the birthplace of the distributed hacktivist collective known as Anonymous. In contrast to other forms of social media, no registration is required to participate on 4chan, and maintaining a persistent identity is both difficult and discouraged. Although many deride 4chan as puerile or nihilistic, I propose that a nascent form of political expression can be discerned within the site's subculture. Specifically, I explore how participants on 4chan use carnivalesque humour and memetic communication to oster a collective identity and articulate a political orientation towards the internet-summed up by the phrase "the internet is serious business"-while remaining committed to an ethic of radical anonymity. In doing so, I recast participation on 4chan as a political act, albeit one that falls outside of a normative or rational framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".