If you have internet access this week, you’ve probably heard about this strange 4chan vs. AT&T situation.  And if you surf 4chan regularly, you'd probably know the real definition of an asshole, really is.  This AT&T/net neutrality/4chan/revenge story is getting far deeper reach, traffic and attention than almost any other story in 4chan history.

In brief, sometime Sunday 7/26/09 AT&T blocked access to two of 4chan’s popular imageboards – the random board /b/ and its anti-repost brother board /r9k/ (Don’t click on those, extremely NSFW and your heart will hurt).  AT&T consumers began reporting the blocked access in the early afternoon, and the imageboards weren’t accessible until midnight.  In that time, the sensational, Orwellian “AT&T Blocks 4chan” story was rapidly spreading throughout Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and Twitter.  So was “AT&T Reportedly Blocks 4chan – This Is Going To Get Ugly” by TechCrunch and “AT&T Has Managed To Piss Off The Wrong Bunch of Web-Nerds” by Gawker.  It’s good to see that the major tech blogs get the picture, as those titles portray 4chan in an appropriately dangerous manner.  The threat that Anonymous poses reminds me of Fight Club:

For about an hour, members of 4chan were disappointed and upset that their favorite site was no longer accessible via iPhone.  A few of them threw in the towel rather early.

As expected, the sobering anti-lulz quickly evolved into vengeful and malicious intent.  A thread on the /b/ imageboard gave birth to the idea that 4chan should ’strike back’ the way that they do best – introducing Operation Exhaust Port.

The object of Operation Exhaust Port:

The only problem. . . well, one of the problems with Operation Exhaust Port is that no one waited until Tuesday to start spreading the rumors.  By Sunday night, the faux news hit Twitter, Digg and all of the other social sharing sites just as fast as the first story did.

Click on image to see epic comments

Twitter search results for “AT&T+CEO” – some were savvy to the troll job, others weren’t.

So this week there’s a whole mess of content and rumors being passed around and shared.  Some news sources report on the blocked content story, some are on the alleged death of the AT&T CEO, and then smart blogs tell the entire story (ie. here).  AT&T did offer a press release on the matter, which you can read in its entirety here.  To paraphrase, they say that:

Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic.

Now, this is the counter point to the Orwellian accusations that AT&T was filtering content.  The imageboards in question do indeed usually feature hacking tricks (hax), NSFW images (CP) and highly offensive and hateful content (lulz), so there is a cloud of thought that says the world would be a better place without access to the site.  The internet would defend even 4chan, however, if ISPs actually told us what sites we can and cannot visit.  No disrespect toward China or Tehran, of course – they have it a lot worse.

Anyway, AT&T is saying that there was a DDoS attack in progress by way of an IP address linked to 4chan, and that it had to be blocked to prevent spreading the attack.  In layman’s terms, someone faked/hacked/used the 4chan IP address to attack someone else’s page/account/profile on the AT&T network, so AT&T blocked img.4chan.org and angered the Anonymous.

On Monday, 4chan owner moot posted a response to the whole situation on the 4chan status blog.  Says moot:

In the end, this wasn’t a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit of a mistake and a poorly executed, disproportionate response on AT&T’s part. Whoever pulled the trigger on blackholing the site probably didn’t anticipate [nor intend] the consequences of doing so.

The word of moot more or less puts the 4chan vs. AT&T war on hold.  Between his response and the AT&T press release, things are settled for now.

So What?

Yet another large company runs into 4chan and falls flat on its ass.  Some say that its “just a bunch of kids” on the internet and that such trivial things do not concern a multi million dollar company.  I’ve recently been writing about how Oprah (Harpo, whatever), Time Magazine and  AT&T were made to be epic n00bs by 4chan.  What is this trend all about?  Who’s next?  AT&T can tell the media that they weren’t affected financially by all of this, but between the coverage of AT&T/net neutrality and the reports of their CEO dying, they can’t have been pleased with what happened here.  That’s bad digital PR at its finest.

I don’t want to just sling mud and laugh at these corporate follies.  I wish I had the chance to help them make the right choices.  Ideally there would always be someone internally at every company who is truly web savvy enough to suggest a good strategy or crafty online PR move – but that’s extremely rare.  Most of the time, digital PR services are outsourced to an agency.

With that said, it genuinely disturbs me to think that there are successful social media agencies and digital marketing firms out there that choke when they deal with the fangs of the internet’s dark side – but they’re out there.  If I were on the client side of the table and an agency tried to sell me their ‘monitoring’ services or claims that they will ‘protect’ my brand’s online reputation, I’d be extremely critical of their practices.  Clients pay thousands to have a bunch of punk college interns compile Twitter and blog post mentions for their brand so they can red flag any harmful mentions (yeah, even in this economy).

Many agency digital PR ‘protection’ services are like the health insurance business model:  monthly payment, monthly payment, monthly payment, *serious incident* – oh wait . . . we don’t cover that, tab’s on you.  What happens when things get really bad?  Personally I’d administer a one-question open-answer critical thinking test to any social media agency before I hire them:

Someone in my company has upset the members of the /b/ board.  Not only is my employee targeted personally, but they are hatefully smearing my brand’s online reputation as well.  What do we do?

To be honest, sometimes you’ll need intricate innovation and stategy, other times it might just warrant one well-written press release.  If you charged $1,000 it would be one dollar for writing the press release and $999 for knowing how to deal with 4chan.

If an agency can answer that question appropriately, then they deserve to handle a major corporate account.

Sources:

Twitter, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Insurgency.info, 4chan.org