The night sky wasn’t the only thing filling with fireworks on America’s Independence Day.
As part of 4chan’s seven-month-long vendetta against feminists, the site’s random imageboard /b/—where raids, pranks, and justice-seeking are commonplace—has threatened to spam hundreds of Tumblr tags and blogs with offensive content.
“These are ‘cleansers’ trying to clean up the tags we’ve raped,” one of the many posts calling /b/ to action stated. “Send them your porn, your gore, your rape, your lolis. Anything. Break. Them.”
Some of the tags /b/ has targeted are #feminism, #gay, #equality, #priviledge, and #disney. /B/ also targeted tags relating to popular fandoms like Homestuck, Sherlock, and Supernatural. For the list of more than 30 tags, see here.
A look through most of these tags doesn’t turn up the gore and porn /b/ claims to have spammed. This is likely because of blogs like 4chancounterspam, which has crowdsourced links to spam profiles to get the foul content removed.
As of noon Saturday, nearly all of the targeted tags have be cleansed of most of the offensive content. It has been replaced with warnings and recaps of what has happened, along with cute photos.
Over on 4chan Saturday morning, /b/ was celebrating its success in riling people up.
This Tumblr raid is just the latest in a long line of the feminism-related pranks /b/ has carried out.
/B/ got this prank war started in January with Operation Bikini Bridge. The goal was to spam social media and get news organizations to report on a controversial new fashion trend that happens when a bikini bottom is stretched between the two hipbones. /B/ hoped to make the bikini bridge a new “thinspo” or pro-anorexia trend.
As this operation gained traction, /b/ tried to double down with Operation Fourth Wave Feminism, which focused on “the attractiveness and sexualization of skinny and fit female bodies (and perhaps for added lulz, underweight females, but that may or may not be feasible).”
About a month later, /b/ launched Operation Freebleeding. Its objective was to convince women that sanitary pads were a male invention to keep them down, and thus women should be comfortable bleeding down their legs.
To help spread this prank, /b/ created photos like the one below and instructed its users to spam Twitter and Facebook with them.
Then there was #EndFathersDay and#WhitesCantBeRaped in June, 4chan’s most successful feminism-related prank since Operation Bikini Bridge.
The operation was spearheaded by 4chan’s politically incorrect board, /pol/, in an effort to anger feminists and make them (and men) look bad.
“This is a holiday celebrating misogyny, demanding appreciation and gifts for doing what a father should be doing anyway, especially when almost all cases of domestic abuse stem from the father,” an anonymous user on /pol/ wrote.
Both hashtags were mentioned more than 40,000 times in a 48-hour period and resulted in #EndFathersDay trending on Twitter worldwide.
Photos by Beverly & Pack/Flickr (CC BY 2.0), su neko/Flickr (CC BY 2.0), michelle brea/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III
