Twitter Under Siege: Is 4chan to Blame?

It would appear that the popular imageboard 4chan may be behind yet another raid on the social networking website Twitter. On Sunday, a large number of falsified accounts were created in order to push the NSFW (Not Suitable/Safe for Work) trending topic, "#gorillapenis", all the way to the top of the list.

4chan has been linked to internet subcultures and activism in the past, most notably Project Chanology, a protest movement against the practices of the Church of Scientology. It has long been the harbinger of various attacks on many different sites, most recently YouTube Porn Day, in which 4chan and eBaum's World organized a mass porn carpet bombing on YouTube.

It would seem, however, that even eBaum's World is not safe from 4chan's ruthless style of pranking. The infamous imageboard website is calling this latest incursion "Operation Shitter", and blame seems to fall squarely on eBaum's World's shoulders. Currently, though, it remains speculation whether or not eBaum's World is actually involved with the raid at all.

It is suggested that these raiders, whether they be the anonymous users of 4chan, eBaum's World or a third unknown party, utilize a script written by them to spam the hashtag "#gorillapenis". Hashtags are explained as being short messages on services such as Twitter, which may be tagged by including one or more hashtags: words or phrases prefixed with a hash symbol.

While there have been numerous such raids, and many similar NSFW trending topics reaching the top of the lists, one thing is certain; with attacks such as these becoming more frequent, Twitter has got to have a better detection program set in place in order to protect us. This can be said especially with Twitter becoming prominent in the majority of the public eye recently.