Christopher Poole, a twenty-something Internet entrepreneur who helped give rise to hacktivist group Anonymous and potentially millions of memes through his infamous website 4chan, has taken a job with tech titan Google.
Mr. Pool, who launched 4chan in 2003 when he was 15, revealed the news in a blog post on Monday.
“Today I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Google,” he wrote.
“When meeting with current and former Googlers, I continually find myself drawn to their intelligence, passion and enthusiasm — as well as a universal desire to share it with others. I’m also impressed by Google’s commitment to enabling these same talented people to tackle some of the world’s most interesting and important problems,” Mr. Poole added.
Using the alias “moot,” Mr. Poole administered 4chan for more than a decade, during which time the Website’s dozens of imageboards — niche forums where users can anonymously weigh in on topics ranging from anime to automobiles —went from attracting a handful of users a day to roughly 22.5 million visitors a month in 2013.
Anonymous, the amorphous hacking and activist movement, is credited with being born on 4chan, as have countless memes and other online phenomena. In 2014, nude images of female celebrities that had been hacked from compromised iCloud accounts were posted on 4chan before being dispersed widely elsewhere on the web.
The site was sold in 2015 to Hiroyuki Nishimura, whose own 2channel website largely inspired 4chan and other imageboards.
Mr. Poole did not elaborate further with respect to his new position with Google, but the announcement was celebrated by Bradley Horowitz, the company’s vice president of Streams, Photos and Sharing, leaving some to suggest the former 4chan administrator will assume a role concerning Google’s social media operations.
“I can’t wait to contribute my own experience from a dozen years of building online communities, and to begin the next chapter of my career at such an incredible company,” Mr. Poole wrote on his blog.
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