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Gay Nigger Association of America

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The GNAA Logo
The GNAA Logo

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. Members have flooded weblogs, produced shock sites, prank-called technical support phone lines, and flooded, mass-invited, and trolled IRC and Soulseek chat rooms. As a consequence, the communities that are attacked 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 on the Slashdot website. It claims to consist of six leaders and approximately 30 to 40 other members. 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. They also have their own IRC server, which is connected to "NiggerNET" reachable by irc.gnaa.us. The main GNAA channel is #gnaa.

The GNAA website states: "We do not support and do not promote racism, homophobia, etc." [1]

Membership

GNAA encourages people to join by watching 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 Internet 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.

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! [2]

Activities

GNAA gained notoriety in the Slashdot community when they launched several flood attacks against the site. [3] [4] 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. [5]

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." [6] 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." [7]

In July 2004, GNAA member JesuitX submitted leaked screenshots of the then-forthcoming operating system Mac OS X 10.4 to popular Apple Macintosh news website MacRumors. [8] [9] 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." [10] When the source was found to be from 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 [11] were genuine (cf. official Apple screenshots), and that the Apple community had been trolled. [12]

GNAA members have created the shock site Last Measure, which often factors into their crapfloods as the destination of links or redirects, and made its source code available under the revised BSD license. [13]

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 samples from their prank AOL calls with the "Hey, everybody! I'm looking at gay porno!" voice from Last Measure.

In late 2004, the GNAA discovered vulnerabilities in weblogging service Xanga. [14]

Trivia

  • GNAA member rolloffle (also known as James A. C. Joyce) wrote the article "Why your Movable Type blog must die", which then made it to the front page of the community-moderated site kuro5hin, despite the fact that its author was a notorious troll.
  • The GNAA has created many scripts to carry out its activities, including specialized scripts for crapflooding sites.
  • 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.
  • In contrast to their lo-fi ASCII text sigs, the GNAA website appears to parody the slick design of many corporate websites. It features pictures of African American athletes and professionals, apparently taken from stock image archives.
  • GNAA has had several "failures" . Most notably:
    • A low-end DoS attempt against several Blogger pages resulted not in their being forced down, but a ban of several IP addresses.
    • Attempts to flood Slashdot administration email addresses with comments regarding editor "Michael" resulted in their primary SMTP server being turned away / eventually banned from sending email.
    • GNAA's domain has been officially blacklisted by several major SPAM lists.

See also

References

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