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2008·Early YouTube·informative

Project Chanology

The month an imageboard turned into a movement and put masks on in the street.

You might remember it as Message to Scientology, Anonymous versus Scientology

It happened on television

The story

What this was

In January 2008 the Church of Scientology tried to remove a leaked internal interview with Tom Cruise from the internet. Users of 4chan took this as censorship and responded — first with a video posted to YouTube on 21 January stating an intent to expel the church from the internet, then with denial-of-service attacks and prank calls, and then, from February, with organised street protests in dozens of cities by people in Guy Fawkes masks.

It first appeared in 2008, during early YouTube.

It is the moment Anonymous became a public thing rather than a posting convention, and the first time a leaderless internet group organised sustained physical demonstrations worldwide. The mask, taken from a film adaptation of a comic, became the global visual shorthand for online-organised protest for the next decade.

The protests continued for years and shifted from disruption to legal and regulatory pressure. Anonymous went on to a long and contested career in hacktivism, and the shape it took here — anonymous, distributed, iconographic — became the template for a great deal of what followed, some of it admirable and some of it not.

You were there

More from 2008

The same internet

Early YouTube

More like this

Related

Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
In January 2008 the Church of Scientology tried to remove a leaked internal interview with Tom Cruise from the internet. Users of 4chan took this as censorship and responded — first with a video posted to YouTube on 21 January stating an intent to expel the church from the internet, then with denial-of-service attacks and prank calls, and then, from February, with organised street protests in dozens of cities by people in Guy Fawkes masks.
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