Christopher Poole
| Christopher Poole | |
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Poole in 2012
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| Born | c. 1988 (age 28–29) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Other names | moot |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, Google employee |
| Known for | Founder and former administrator of 4chan |
| Website | chrishateswriting |
Christopher Poole (born c. 1988) is an American entrepreneur. He is best known for founding two web sites, 4chan and Canvas. He started 4chan pseudonymously, under the screen name moot. In 2016, he began working for Google.
In 2008, Leopoldo Godoy of Brazilian TV Globo called Poole's 4chan "the ground zero of Western web culture."
In April 2009, Poole was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine. The results were questioned even before the poll completed, however, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing were used to influence the vote. 4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely, when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME."
On September 12, 2009, Poole gave a talk on why 4chan has a reputation as a "Meme Factory" at the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna, Austria, which was part of the Paraflows 09 festival, themed Urban Hacking. In this talk, Poole mainly attributed this to the anonymous system, and to the lack of data retention on the site ("The site has no memory").
On February 10, 2010, Poole spoke at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, California. He spoke about the increasing prevalence of persistent user identities and the sharing of personal information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter and he also spoke about the value of anonymous posting on sites such as 4chan. Fred Leal of the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo said his inclusion in the conference "indicates that something extraordinary is happening... [4chan] challenges every Internet convention: it is, alone, the antithesis of Google, social networking sites, and blogs."
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