4chan’s Infiltration into Gen Z Slang, or Let’s Not Bring Phrenology Back Just Because You’re an Incel
- Victoria Xia
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
The Internet is a horrible place. One of the most horrible parts of the Internet is, as many are familiar with, 4chan, a mostly-anonymous online forum centralized around images to share ideas across a variety of topic boards, such as /k/ (a place for 4channers to gather and discuss weaponry, oftentimes those regarding the Rhodesian military), /mlp/ (notorious for not just My Little Pony discussions that are grossly inappropriate for the intended audience of the show, but also bestiality and white supremacist rhetoric), and /b/ (a lawless “random stuff” board that’s made its own toxic cesspool biome where only other fellow /b/ frequenters can survive in).
Some may argue that 4chan is not entirely evil, and this much is true. The site’s origins are, after all, rather innocuous. There are still enclaves of what 4chan used to be, like 2channel, the Japanese site that 4chan was based on, where people discuss anime & manga on /a/ and engage in otaku culture on /jp/. These spaces became less active, however, when the misogynistic tidal wave known as GamerGate hit 4chan in 2015: female figures associated with gaming, particularly Zoë Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu, were fiercely attacked by male right-wingers online, filling 4chan and places like it with sexual harassment, death threats, and—specifically for Quinn, the center of this assault—rumors that sexual favors were exchanged with a journalist for good publicity on a game.
4chan was consumed by right-wing ideology, sucking in young men who previously never cared for politics to ruthlessly attack women who they perceived as ruining their favorite pastimes with feminism; /poI/, the board for political incorrectness that had previously been used to quarantine extremists from the tamer parts of 4chan, became the centerpiece of the site, completely awash with hatred and bigotry. It isolated already-toxic netizens and turned them into domestic terrorist-hopefuls, pulling more and more people into their circle by injecting popular media with complaints about diversity & inclusion.
It’s strange and upsetting how pervasive 4chan culture and slang have been in the United States.
Out of 4chan’s 22 million unique monthly users, about half of them are American; from them, the American populace has absorbed rage comics (inescapable in the early 2010s), Pepe the Frog, Rickrolling, and more. Memes are how 4channers communicate, and they’re easy to share and understand; due to the need to keep a point short and snappy, they depend on simple, reductionist viewpoints to get a hateful message across as quickly as possible. As you go down the rabbit hole, things get more conspiratorial, but on the most surface level, these are things backwards grandparents say that people brush off at Thanksgiving; sometimes, in a twisted way, they might elicit a shameful laugh. Divorced from their original contexts, you may even parrot these things.
It’s more than likely that you have, at some point, watched a TikTok that called something good “based” or a person they viewed favorably, a “Chad;” you might have referred to things you dislike or consider low-effort as “slop”—the New York Times has even used this phrase in an article title! You might have never thought of where these words come from, or if that even matters.
Here’s the truth: this is all 4chan lingo. “Based,” though it is now generally used to call something admirable, unique, and/or impressive, originates from terms to encourage non-progressive, controversial views that go against “wokeness.” The Internet’s use of “slop” has antisemitic connotations, coming from the term “goyslop,” which is used frequently in conspiracies that big, scary Jewish corporations are poisoning the American populace with low-brow media. A “Chad” (or a “Tyrone”, if a given 4channer is racist—admittedly, that seems to be the general site populace) can just be anyone that a person finds cool, but traces itself back to incel spaces where Chads are sex-god alpha males who steal away Stacy femoids who won’t date nice guys like you even though you’ve been looksmaxxing for years and surgically corrected your canthal tilt to give yourself hunter eyes.
As Adam Aleksic—also known as EtymologyNerd—has observed, it’s not because everyone in your circle is suddenly a far-right extremist, but because 4channers and incels deliberately repackage their in-circle slang to become more palatable to outsiders: an insecure young girl might be turned away by terms incorporating slurs, but she could be misled by looks-based pseudoscience or be enticed by words that could be used to put down others she considers less attractive. That’s how we get teenagers talking about “jawmaxxing” and “heightmogging” when they’d never stepped foot in an incel forum—because it sounds funny or they think it’ll help build social traction. Comedy is turned into a weapon; it’s easy to infect others by inserting bigoted slang into vague jokes: you aren’t perpetuating racist phrenology—you’re just saying that a woman of color has a witch skull! Maybe you’re just being ironic; it’s only a joke, after all.
The proliferation of these terms indicates a deep, sinister trend. When so much of our slang comes from hateful places, how do we prevent our youth from becoming hateful? If a teen boy starts feeling resentful of his peers for rejecting him, who’s to say he won’t become isolated in his own little corner of the web as many radicalized youth do, ridiculing those who are more ingrained within reality? Who’s to say he won’t “go ER” and kill people because of his integration into misogyny—when it all started from Instagram posts with wojaks portraying women and girls as whiny, bitchy, and ungrateful?
There is an insidiousness in modern-day Internet-derived slang that suggests younger generations are becoming more and more comfortable with harmful rhetoric, and it is social media that encourages people to become bigots. A plethora of evidence suggests that alt-right extremism flourishes in online spaces, and not just on 4chan: Reddit, Telegram, Twitch, and Discord all have hands in encouraging hate, and even the most mainstream of platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even YouTube—have their fair share of bigots, with these platforms often contributing to further radicalization of already-right-wing users.
We can’t stop people from learning: censorship of right-wing extremists often causes them to simply move deeper, onto spaces like Parler, Gab, and VKontakte. They take people with them, make dogwhistles, and continue to grow and fester.
What we can do, though, is learn and educate. We must remember that words have power, and we certainly cannot give 4chan—or any other dangerous cesspool of toxicity and hate—any more of it.