In the early morning of 11th November 2011, four policemen stood in front of Sebastian Maki’s home. They wanted to arrest him for having hacked and leaked the personal information of 16,000 Finnish people to ylilauta, a website similar to 4chan, where users share illegal content online. The leaked information had included names, email addresses and phone numbers of private persons.
ylilauta’s article is one of the most visited and active image-board forums in Finland. The site shares a bigoted orientation towards minorities and women and its discussion threads are filled with hate speech, e.g. ‘Muslim’, ‘Islam’, ‘nigger’, ‘gay’,’suvakki’ (Finnish for ‘whore’) and ‘police’ (Vaahensalo, 2021).
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The article discusses ylilauta’s online environment by exploring the way in which it forms a unique emotional landscape of precarity. It is based on an analysis of the discourses that are used in the forum and interviews with its users. The study focuses on the ways in which these discourses allow anti-social behaviour and hate speech, as well as political discussions and politization of daily life.
The research material consists of ylilauta discussion threads and pictures, and interviews with the users of the image-board. The article uses an analytical framework that combines concepts from the sociology of media and a variety of qualitative research methods, including online ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis and interviewing. The analysis reveals how the ylilauta image-board is used as an arena for a masculine intimate public and a place for emotional work, peer support and humour.
