Netflix’s terrifying doc ‘The Antisocial Network’ traces the origins of QAnon to 4Chan (2024)

Millennials love to wax poetic about the “simpler times” of the early internet in the 2000s, back when memes were harmless internet jokes and no one running for president had a Twitter account. But Netflix’s new documentary The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem—which began streaming today—will make you realize that the early days of the internet were not as innocent as we remember. Through interviews with former coders, hackers, and trolls, The Antisocial Network traces the origins of the dangerous alt-right mass delusion known as “QAnon” back to the first iteration of the so-called “edgy” online posting board, 4chan. And though some of the connections drawn in the film feel tenuous, the overall picture is nevertheless terrifying.

Directed by Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones (who also helmed the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man, about how Pepe the Frog became an alt-right mascot), The Antisocial Network features talking head interviews with formally notorious “internet” guys, identified not by their legal names, but by their username aliases. This includes a former 4chan user who goes by “f*cknet,” one of the more-clear eyed interviewees who appears in the film. “I’m just trying to clean up what I see as my old mistakes,” they tell audiences.

What, exactly, are those mistakes? Angelini and Jones breeze through a quick history of the website 4chan, an American spin on a Japanese internet forum, 2chan, launched by Christopher Poole (aka “moot”) in 2003. (Moot himself is conspicuously absent from the doc, and presumably declined to be interviewed.) The site exploded in popularity, and it didn’t take long for its user base to start using the platform to spread chaos in the real world. That included, but was not limited to: White teens wearing afros and forming swastikas in public spaces, harassing and hacking the white supremacist commentator Hal Turner, and protesting outside the Church of Scientology. Some of those pursuits sound more noble than others, but almost all was done, first and foremost, in the name of “edgy” humor.

Or, as f*cknet puts it in the film, “I don’t want to imply that all the people who were trolling Hal Turner were anti-racist. A lot of them just wanted to f*ck with people.”

One of those people was a user who goes by “kirtaner,” a Canadian man whose real name is Aubrey Cottle. Cottle claims to be a founder the “hacktivist” movement known as Anonymous, which came about after Poole stripped Cottle of his 4chan admin privileges. (Cottle says Poole wanted 4chan to become a social network more akin to Facebook, while Cottle felt the site should retain it anonymous, chaotic spirit.) Cottle happily admits he thought his “trolls” were hilarious: “If you were in on the joke, you were just laughing your ass off.”

But the joke got a lot less funny after Anonymous—in retaliation for what they saw as state-sanctioned violence toward the Occupy Wall Street movement—hacked into the CIA and FBI, and put a target on their backs. The FBI arrested Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond and sentenced him to 10 years. The other longtime Anonymous hackers like Cottle and f*cknet were effectively scared into hanging up their keyboards.

Here’s where The Antisocial Network gets a little murky. With the big name hackers gone from the internet, 4chan—so the movie posits—became a darker place. This led to Gamergate, a targeted harassment campaign aimed at women gamers. Poole banned Gamergate discussion on 4chan, so users moved to 8chan to talk about it. Breitbart, the ultra-conservative website run by Donald Trump’s former strategist Steven Bannon, sympathized with, and covered Gamergate. Therefore, all of these angry, depressed former 4chan users were wooed by Trump, and used their trolling power to get him elected.

Once elected, however, Trump failed to deliver on his promise to “drain the swamp”—unless, that is, you believed he was secretly battling the evil, pedophilic, blood-drinking Democratic elites behind the scenes. In 2017, an Anonymous user on 4chan posted a cryptic message with three plus signs, and signed the post as “Q.” Another 4chan user, Isaac H.P., made a YouTube video about the post, which he claimed predicted a Trump tweet that also used a triple plus sign, by seven minutes. (It’s later explained in the documentary that internet users were simply doctoring the time stamps on Trump’s tweets, to make it look like they had predicted what he would say.) The idea was that Trump wasn’t able to speak freely about his grand plan, but could distribute “breadcrumbs” via Q.

The QAnon conspiracy quickly spiraled out of control. Any anonymous 4chan user could claim to be “Q,” and they did. They were happy to troll gullible people, as they’d been doing since 2003. But a certain subset of Trump’s base bought in completely, and still to this day believe that Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children in order to stay young. It’s an absurd mass delusion that’s led to countless real-life violence, and highlights the unfathomable dangers of f*cking with people for the lulz.

None people interviewed in The Antisocial Network seem willing to accept that the undertone of violence and hate was baked into the culture of 4chan from Day 1. That’s where the documentary falls short. The former users interviewed are quick to distance themselves from what they describe as the truly dark days of the website, in the late 2010s. But there’s nothing lighthearted, harmless, or funny about kids doing the Nazi salute at anime conventions. 4chan isn’t a tale of “memes to mayhem.” The memes are the mayhem.