Tashiro-gun Banzai: The First Online Poll Bomb

Recently I read this book called "Kill All Normies" on the suggestion of my friend, who told me it was popular in Melbourne. It reminded me of this anecdote that I dont think is particularly well known in English-speaking media, but I think it is interesting. 

The 4chan community took a lot more than just source code from 2chan. Some of the pranks that they were originally known for actually originated from there. For example, Nagle mentions the TIME Magazine's Person Of The Year, "mARBLECAKE. ALSO THE GAME" public prank from 2008. This was 4chan's big break.

What isn't as well publicised in Anglophone media is that 2chan actually did the exact same thing in 2001. In that year, Anon 2chan users organised to vote  the Japanese comedian Masashi Tashiro  into the Time person of the year online poll. I believe this also may be the first documented use of the internet to organise, clandestinely and en masse, for this sort of mass-influence activity.

Masashi Tashiro was a comedian popular in domestic Japan who had gone through a series of public scandals involving him possessing recreational drugs, and peeping through women's bathrooms. At the time, he was attempting to reconcile to the public because he was a huge source of shame and embarrasment to everyone associated with him. But even through his campaign to show humility he would often act inappropriately. Anons probably saw this as the funniest target of their mass vote campaign, intending to amplify the embarrassment potentially to the whole world. While recalling the event, which they refer to as Tashiro-matsuri, or "Tashiro Festival", a commemorative video notes that they had temporarily made him "more popular than Osama Bin Laden".

Because 4chan archives don't go back as far as 2008, we don't have any reliable primary sources and we can't see the degree of how much influence this campaign had on 4chan's early community. There is, however, some circumstantial evidence that they are linked. For instance, in the Tashiro Festival 2channers wrote, ran and distributed scripts that were named after science fiction weapons, such as the "Super Tashiro Cannon". 4chan users actually also copied this tradition when Praetox, a user of the /a/ anime board of 4chan, developed a DDoS tool called the "Low Orbit Ion Cannon", a tool which has variants that eventually became more broadly used in hacking/cyber security. 

This event is interesting to me for a few reasons. Firstly it implicates an intersectional, cosmopolitan study of the Japanese online community as something worth caring about within the discipline of media studies, if 4chan was not already reason enough alone. 2chan is equally as prolific, acerbic and offensive (as well as becoming a refuge for extreme right-wingers under the auspice of free speech) as 4chan in all parts, but it's integration into wider society has laid out slightly differently. I personally believe this has to do with class structure and social values, but there may also be some legislative and legal assumptions being made which have effects on the power of grassroots movements. Now that the original owner of 4chan sold it to 2chan's creator Hiroyuki Nishimura, after he had a falling out with 2chan's hoster Jim Watkins (now of 8chan and QAnon fame), 2chan, 4chan & 8chan's legacies are pretty closely linked.