The Explainer: 4Chan v Jessi Slaughter Revisited

Cracked.com has an excellent piece explaining the truth behind the nine most misunderstood stories of 2010. Along with the expected pop-culture stuff (Social Network), politics (Tea Partiers are not a joke), and media (no, Leno didn't get Conan fired), there's the truth behind one of the most baffling internet stories in recent years (I wrote about my bafflement here): the flame war between 4chan and Jessi Slaughter. See you're baffled already.

Anyway, the thumbnail is this. Jessi Slaughter is an 11 year-old girl in Florida. 4chan is some kind of message board known for its aggressive, anonymous denizens. Somehow, these two got hooked up, leading to Jessi posting some profanity laden videos on Youtube, her father joining in with a drunken rant, and 4chan tormenting the Slaughters with prank calls, pizza deliveries, and the like. What was baffling about this: how did the (presumably) adults at 4chan get hooked up with an 11 year old girl, and why did they care so much to attack her? Well, Cracked.com comes up with the rest of the story:

It was 4chan making sexual advances to, and then real-life death threats toward, an elementary school girl.

Let's back up for a moment.

4chan isn't entirely pedophiles, but it has a lot of pedophiles. Historians may never know whether it started with real pedophiles or simply hipsters making pedophile jokes in order to be shocking (they invented the "Pedobear" meme, a child-molestation themed mascot), but we know that the No. 1 job of 4chan moderators is trying to stem the tide of child porn (or "CP," as it's referred to in 4chan jargon) that floods the site. Surf /b/ for an hour, and you'll wind up with naked children thumbnails on your hard drive.

So the girl in the video, who goes by Jessi Slaughter, showed up on /b/ one night and, as they tend to do, /b/ tried to get the fifth-grade girl to strip. She refused to show enough skin and eventually took to her webcam to call /b/ a bunch of losers (4chan keeps no archives, but you can find the screen grabs of all this if you Google it and hate yourself).

Anonymous sprung into action. This is the type of cause Anonymous really gets into. Some of you may know them only for their attacks on Scientology or their defense of the WikiLeaks leakers. You probably don't know that for every one "good" deed, they perform several hundred like this. And by "like this," we mean they hunted down the personal information of an 11-year-old girl, including her home address and phone number, and began calling her house at all hours and making death threats. Hundreds and hundreds of 4chan posters jumped onboard, unified in their drive to terrorize a small child.

See, that makes sense! No mystery can survive the internet. (the whole Cracked piece is worth reading, btw).