Gay Nigger Association of America

The Gay Nigger Association of America, also known as the GNAA, is a self-aggrandizing Internet troll organization that primarily targets Internet communities in an effort to disrupt their normal activities and annoy their users. The name itself, which was taken from a movie title, has been designed to be offensive. It is generally assumed to have been chosen because of the stigma that has been associated with homosexuality, and the fact that the term "nigger" is generally considered a racial slur against blacks. Despite the term "Association of America" (a possible reference to the similarly-named recording industry (RIAA) and motion picture (MPAA) groups) the organization has participants from countries other than the United States.

Members have made attempts to flood weblogs, produced shock sites, prank-called technical support telephone lines, and flooded, mass-invited, and trolled IRC. As a consequence, the communities targeted treat GNAA members as nuisances and frequently respond with technological and social anti-trolling measures (such as comment moderation) to limit future disruption caused by trolling.

Background information

The group originated in the comments section of the Slashdot website. While the number of members are unknown, the GNAA has listed members "timecop" as the founder and President and "jesuitx" as a co-founder and Vice President. The GNAA first appeared in January 2003, trolling Slashdot using ASCII art logos representing the organization and satirical news releases pertaining to the contents of Slashdot articles. As with other troll organizations, members of the GNAA adopt pseudonyms to preserve their anonymity and their true identities are generally not known.

The GNAA website, which appears to parody the slick design of many corporate websites and features pictures of African American athletes and professionals, apparently taken from stock image archives, states that the GNAA does not either support or promote racism, homophobia, and other kinds of hatred. However, they have poked fun at Latvians by calling them "grotesquely obese, deformed goblin-like mongrels very closely resembling pigs, [ who ] practice Judaism and have a habit [ of ] creeping into houses and stealing the foreskins of babies". ^[1] While their main motivations are difficult to determine, they have targeted websites and blogs that promote "anti Gaynigger and pro-Zionist propaganda". ^[2]

Membership

GNAA encourages people to join by suggesting that potential recruits watch the 1992 Danish low-budget movie Gayniggers From Outer Space, from which their name derives. The GNAA's entry requirements also include successfully achieving a "first post" on Slashdot consisting of GNAA troll text, or registering support by upwardly moderating GNAA comments. A test on the subject matter in Gayniggers From Outer Space is then administered by an IRC bot.

File:GNAA ascii sig.png

GNAA ASCII signature

The GNAA has a signature which their members use whenever they perform a crapflood or post a news release. The full "sig", which includes an embedded ASCII art picture of the letters "GNAA" on a wall, can be found on their website. It begins:

GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

• Are you GAY?
• Are you a NIGGER?
• Are you a GAY NIGGER?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!

Notable members

One of the most noted members in the GNAA is "Gary Niger". Gary, a fictional character coined by GNAA vice-president jesuitx, is cited as a press contact in nearly every press release or trolling the GNAA performs. The name was likely chosen for its similarity to the phrase "Gay Nigger". Latvian member "areems" has managed to crapflood numerous Internet blogs hosted on LiveJournal, using a script written in Perl, since he joined the GNAA in 2005. Another member, "rolloffle", who has since left the GNAA, participated in many trolling incidents and created many scripts to cause problems for various software programs that are used in internet forums. "Rolloffle" was also the author of the article "Why your Movable Type blog must die", which was published on the website Kuro5hin. GNAA member "Rucas" is the lead developer of GNAA Last Measure and until recently hosted the largest Last Measure mirror at peoplesprimary.com. He has recently released latvianbotnet.pl, a Perl script to crapflood IRC channels. GNAA member "l0de" is listed as a head technician by the GNAA and is the host of his Internet radio show, the l0de Radio Hour. Other trolls that have membership in the GNAA include GNAA president "timecop", "x_over_ln_x", "popeye", "abortion", "tirel", "Grog", "Dessimat0r", "lysol", "_ns", "Zeikfried", "rhppnrth" and "incog".

Activities

Website disruption

File:GNAA crapflood.jpg

Attempt to crapflood Slashdot by the GNAA: note topics modded down to -1

The GNAA often attempts to disrupt the operation of websites, and has been moderately successful in doing so. They first gained notoriety in the Slashdot community when they launched several flood attacks against the site. Slashdot subsequently implemented open proxy-banning measures in its posting system; GNAA members claim that their crapflooding campaign spurred this change. They registered thousands of usernames en masse to mark Slashdot editor "michael" as their foe. ^[3] In late 2004, the GNAA discovered vulnerabilities in weblogging service Xanga. In a related attack, they launched a Denial of Service attack on Slashdot, taking down its search engine for a few days. ^[4] During May 2004, GNAA members flooded the popular image board 4chan, contributing to the fourth non-permanent shutdown of the site shortly thereafter. In the list of reasons why it closed down, the administrator wrote: "Flooding. GNAA put the final nail in the coffin, however I am thankful that they willingly ceased the flood after finding out it was costing me money." ^[5] However, a poster on the Something Awful Forums later stated that this was only one of several factors that caused them to be shut down: "It was not the GNAA who killed 4chan (I quite like them actually), or really the moronic users, it was a man named Chris, who goes by the name TheRowan and runs a business that shuts you down if you fail to play along." ^[6]

The GNAA have been recognised as being deliberately disruptive by several organisations. For instance, on Freenode's IRC server, the #GNAA channel redirects to #you_have_got_to_be_kidding with a warning message indicating that the network might be inappropriate. This is standard Freenode behavior for juped channels. Other IRC networks similarly jupe #GNAA. Jodi Dean, Associate Professor of Political Science (Hobart and William Smith Colleges), in a presentation on blogging for a Cultural Studies Association meeting in Tuscon, noted that when she started blogging she was disturbed by neo-Nazi attacks and that:

"I've also been unsettled by those I can't place, those who may be satirical, performative in non-pc ways, and those whose comments are just generally disruptive and malicious. For example, one guy posted from the GNAA—which seems to be an anti-blog group with various satirical elements and strategies for irritating bloggers. GNAA stands for Gay Nigger Association of America and apparently gets its name from a short 1992 Danish movie called Gay Niggers from Outerspace, a film that appears to be an actual movie, a porn send up, but I can't be completely sure." ^[7]

The GNAA have attempted to troll Mac OS X users several times. In July 2004, GNAA member jesuitx submitted leaked screenshots of the then-forthcoming operating system Mac OS X v10.4 to popular Apple Macintosh news website MacRumors. A report on the site reads "With WWDC just days away, the first Tiger information and screenshots appears to have been leaked. According to sources, Apple will reportedly provide developers with a Mac OS X 10.4 Preview copy at WWDC on Monday. The screenshots provided reportedly come from this upcoming developer preview." ^[8] When the source was found to the GNAA, many declared the screenshots to be fake, based on the organization's apparent disreputability. The GNAA released a press release which claimed that the screenshots were genuine (cf. official Apple screenshots), and that the Apple community had been trolled. ^[9]

On October 31, 2004, the Dremel website featured a pumpkin carving kit for Halloween and linked to a Goatse pumpkin image as an example of what could be achieved. GNAA members then added their logo to the pumpkin image, leading visitors to think the GNAA had hacked the Dremel website. ^[10]

In July 2005, the GNAA released a 2.2 gigabyte, falsified pirate copy of Mac OS 10.4 x86 developer edition on several piracy-related BitTorrent sites such as torrent-addiction.com, which upon booting displays "Last Measure": several infamous shock site images along with a looping audio clip stating "Hey Everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!", watermarked with the GNAA logo.

Shock sites

GNAA members Rucas, Armorfist, and Sam have created the shock site Last Measure, which often factors into their crapfloods as the destination of links or redirects. The GNAA has created many scripts to carry out its activities, including specialized scripts for crapflooding sites and made its source code available under the revised BSD license.

Prank calls

GNAA also runs a conference call system, which they use to troll various companies and people, including AOL. They have produced an MP3 which combines excerpts from their prank AOL calls with the "Hey, everybody! I'm looking at gay porno!" sample from Last Measure.

Hoaxes and spoilers

File:Dattebayo.jpg

Dattebayo fansub website with GNAA notice

In June 2005, the GNAA created a fake Mac OS X Tiger release for Intel x86 processors which caught media attention from Mac Daily News on June 11. ^[11] The next day, the supposed leak made front page news on Slashdot and was mentioned on the G4 show Attack of the Show ^[12]. The DVD image released onto BitTorrent merely booted an image of hello.jpg (goatse). The remaining several gigabytes of space were filled with the text "GNAAGNAA...." repeating. However, in August of 2005, this hoax was created again, with a variety of different images and a fake bootloader that gave generic error messages if the date was before August the 4th. ^[13]

The GNAA created a fake PDF of the latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which contains nothing but various shocksite images, and released it to BitTorrent. The GNAA also posted various spoilers about the new book onto a Harry Potter fan forum, causing them to temporarily shut down until 1-2 days after the book's release. A site was also created and hosted by GNAA member Zeikfried containing several major plot spoilers several days before the release date.^[14]

In August 2005, GNAA released a copy of Gay Niggers from Outer Space onto fansub website Dattebayo, falsely labeled as episode 146 of the Japanese anime show Naruto. The film was preceded by the opening credits of the show. One link between GNAA and Dattebayo that was immediately noted was is that both claim to have a member using the moniker 'timecop.' Additionally, Dattebayo claims that their webpage was designed by GNAA.

Press releases

File:GNAA press release.jpg

GNAA press release

The GNAA crapfloods forums by having its users post links to "press releases" issued by the GNAA. This technique is referred to as Adequacy Style Trolling (an homage to the defunct troll portal adequacy.org). While some of the events the GNAA talk about are attributed to their activities online, they also create fake news releases about "hot button" subjects such as Terri Schiavo, Condoleezza Rice and Nick Berg. The press releases are published under names such as the GNAP to poke fun at news organizations such as the Associated Press, and are published in HTML and ASCII text to a large number of message boards, including Slashdot. Each press release also contains a small introduction to the GNAA and their ASCII art signature.

Backlash

Because of the activities the GNAA perform online, various websites have instituted methods to either stop or curb the amount of trolling by the GNAA. Slashdot has a moderation system that is supposed to curb activities such as "First posting". Slashdot explains that first post comments are usually "one of those odd little memetic hiccups that come out of nowhere and run amok." Their system moderates these posts and downgrades them for being off topic and makes them almost unreadable. This Slashdot tool is key, since the GNAA requires a user to perform a "first post" in order to join the GNAA. Slashdot and other websites also began to ban users for performing GNAA related acts or began to ban open-proxy addresses to prevent spamming. Users at different forums also have made fun of the GNAA and their members and have mocked their activities. In the words of one unimpressed Brawl-Hall poster: "Sorry, junior, but a Spam-a-thon that lasts fifteen minutes and taking over an IRC chat ain't a 'win'. Maybe you could take over some AOL chatrooms too, then you'd be 'teh c00l', right? Hah, what a joke." ^[15] Slashdot has also called the GNAA the "axis of abuse", along with Trollkore and anti-slash.org, who also try to cause problems for the Slashdot community.

See also

• Internet troll
• l0de Radio Hour
• Slashdot trolling phenomena
• Trolltalk

References

1. ^ GNAA press release insulting Latvians
2. ^ Announcement of Aimgirl disruption
3. ^ Slashdot – Editor Michael's "freaks list" – Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for x86 Leaked? (June 12 2005)
4. ^ http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/28/161214/43
5. ^ Something Awful thread (Must be able to login to see the page)
6. ^ See front page of 4chan
7. ^ I cite : Blogging Theory, April 24 2005. Jodi's presentation can be found here.
8. ^ Mac Rumours - Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Screenshots? (June 26 2004) (discussion) – WWDC, Photos and More on Tiger (June 27 2004)
9. ^ http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=520
10. ^ forum discussing the Goatse GNAA image on the Dremel website (October 31 2004)
11. ^ "Report: Apple Mac OS X 10.4.1 for Intel hits piracy sites", Mac Daily News, June 11 2005
12. ^ GNAUK – G4TV Attack of the Show footage – Fake OSX #2 – Harry Potter on Bittorrent – Harry Potter spoilers in forum
13. ^ http://forums.anti-slash.org/viewtopic.php?t=577
14. ^ GNAA Thread

External links

• GNAA Site
• Google: Query for name GNAA on Slashdot website
• Gayniggers from Outer Space at IMDb
• "James A. C. Joyce" (GNAA member rolloffle) (February 3 2004). Why your Movable Type blog must die. Kuro5hin.org.
• GNAUK - this United Kingdom branch is mentioned in some GNAA press releases (sources: 1, 2, 3)
• Article on the GNAA at Encyclopædia Dramatica. (Warning: a photo of Goatse is used in the article)
• Last Measure.com