Behind 4chan's strange, offensive online campaigns
The leak of dozens of stolen celebrity nude photographs has taken a bizarre new twist, as Twitter users are being asked to post their own naked selfies with the hashtag "leak4jlaw" in solidarity with actress Jennifer Lawrence whose private photos were hacked.
That perverse movement was started by users of the message board 4chan.org, where many of the private photos surfaced this weekend, reports CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano.
However, it appears that "#leak4jlaw" has backfired. Many people on Twitter are making fun of the hashtag -- the latest in a long list of weird and sometimes offensive or dangerous ideas concocted by people who frequent the 4chan website.
For example, if you were ever the victim of a "rickroll" -- clicked on a link, only to be redirected to a Rick Astley music video -- you can thank 4chan for coming up with that prank.
4chan users also popularized LOL cat memes, those ubiquitous cat photos with silly captions. They helped the amateur music video "Chocolate Rain" go viral.
But 4chan users also hacked Sarah Palin's personal email account, and they spread the false rumor that Steve Jobs had died of a heart attack -- some three years before his actual death from cancer.
New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton said that's not the worst of it.
"There's one section of the site which is just a mishmosh of everything evil you could imagine on the internet -- from pictures of dead people and car accidents, to very severe porn," Bilton said.
While some 4chan message boards are innocuous, others are not safe for work, full of anonymously posted content too obscene or racist to show on television.
"On the very evil parts of the site, they tend to say pretty much whatever they want and there are no repercussions for that," Bilton said.
Users are drawn to the anonymity provided by the message boards. In fact, many mask-wearing members of the vigilante-hacker group "anonymous" started out as frequent 4chan visitors.
The site was created in 2003 by Christopher Poole when he was just 15 years old. At a TED conference in 2010, Poole explained why it was important for 4chan users to remain anonymous.
"Sites like it are kind of going the way of the dinosaur right now. They're endangered because we're moving towards social networking, we're moving towards persistent identity. We're moving towards, you know, a lack of privacy, really," Poole said.
That's something Jennifer Lawrence and the other stars, whose personal photos were recently leaked online, now know all too well. 4chan has more than 160,000 active users responsible for over 1.6 billion posts.
Its popularity has declined in recent years, however, because of competition from services like Twitter and Reddit, which allow its users to create similar content without 4chan's baggage.