4Chan Ebola Virus Outbreak Meme Ebola-Chan Is Not Spreading the Disease: They're Obnoxious Teens, Not Supervillains

There’s a new sport afoot, the content churnalist’s version of exotic big game hunting, and it involves 4Chan. Because of course it does. Mainstream journalism outlets have only recently discovered 4Chan, the image board where anything goes, the producers of memetic mud, the place where teen cocksurety--secretly compensating for adolescent insecurities--goes to touch itself. From the outside it looks like a jungly swamp of oddballs, listicle fodder, and outrages. And so they hunt. It’s 4Chan Outrage Poaching and the local outrage population is seemingly inexhaustible.

The latest outrage captured in the 4Chan jungles is the spread of Ebola Chan (or Ebola-Chan). Headlines would suggest that Ebola Chan rumors are running rampant through West Africa, contributing to the spread of anti-aid worker conspiracism that has fueled so much violence and misinformation as the epidemic has spread. Here’s IBTimes with “Nigeria: Is Ebola Meme Being Used to Spread Fears Virus ‘Was Created By White People’?” Betteridge’s Law of Headlines would seem to apply here. And here’s the Washington Post with “4Chan’s Latest, Terrible ‘Prank’: Convincing West Africans that Ebola Doctors Actually Worship the Disease.”

The Ebola Chan meme began on 4Chan on the anime (/a) board with an image of an anime nurse bearing a bloody skull. The image began to spread and soon a proper response was codified. If you are “visited” by Ebola Chan, the correct response was to post “I Love You Ebola-Chan!” This was pretty sick in the face of the unimaginable horrors suffered across West Africa, but well within the realms of the kind of shock humor that can be found all over the Internet. Where it got really despicable, like GamerGate despicable, was when the meme became a totem for fantasies of African genocide and racial purity.

Articles on Ebola Chan have been long on insinuations of damage, but short on evidence. One article states “a theory that blames Western countries for creating the deadly virus of Ebola… proliferated after an image representing the personification of Ebola went viral.” In some abstruse technical sense, the claim isn’t false. But it seems to place a great deal of weight on an Internet meme that has virtually no traction in Africa. And African nations affected by this unprecedented Ebola epidemic have been fertile ground for horrific and damaging falsehoods before 4Chan stepped in.

Vocativ, on the other hand, more accurately captures the truth with its headline: “4Chan Users Are Trying to Spread Ebola Lies in West Africa.” “Trying” being the operative word. It’s a lesson that we must learn over and over: being terrible does not equate to being effective. It does appear that someone from 4Chan attempted to stoke Ebola Chan panic across the Nigerian message board Nairaland, but what is equally obvious was the ineptitude of the attempt, with users immediately laughing off the suggestion that western doctors worship an anime Ebola goddess.

Ebola Chan, especially when used for racist ends, is yet another example of the despicable depths to which people, especially teenagers blessed with anonymity, can stoop in their rhetoric. However, it does not represent a real world danger. To act as if it does is to play into the 4Chan narrative. It is to endorse the way they see themselves, as brigaders with real power. And yeah, they can coordinate a harassment campaign against women who dare to have opinions like no one’s business. But they can’t spread the Ebola virus. To imagine that the populations of entire nations will be fooled by a bunch of /b/tards is to invest in them a power they simply do not have. By all means, let’s condemn. But let’s not lose sight of who we are condemning.