2014 Tumblr-4chan Raids

Overview

2014 4chan-Tumblr Raids were a series of back-and-forth spamming and other hostile acts carried out by sites Tumblr and 4chan against each other in early July 2014.

Background

On June 9th, 2014, Tumblr blog shutdown4chan^[1] posted a slide outlining a plan to carry out a raid on 4chan during the American Independence Day on the 4th of July. The post condemned the image board community as “racist, misogynistic and pure evil” and revealed that the goal of the mission was to shut down the site. It has been since rumored that the blog post might have been originally created by 4chan’s /pol/ board to trigger the war in the first place.

During the raid day, several posts attributed to the social justice blogosphere on Tumblr were made on 4chan’s boards, which accused the authors of their own prejudice and injustice. After that, users of 4chan retaliated by flooding a wide range of Tumblr tags related to feminism, social justice, and popular fandoms with gore and other unrelated shock images. Tumblr counter-acted by burying those posts with with their own posts of cute things, blocking the spammers, and advising other users to stay away from the tags until things clear up.

Notable Developments

Following the initial exchange, several petitions were created with the goal of shutting down 4chan^[2]^[3]. In retaliation, 4chan users launched a counter-petition to label users of Tumblr as “mentally handicapped landwhales”^[4].

On July 5th, the day after the raid, YouTuber InternetAristocrat uploaded a video featuring a sarcastic commentary of the events that transpired that day. In less than 24 hours, the video already gained 13,200 views and 1,645 thumbs up.