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Within a couple of hours, CBRC had breached her Youtube account, via successfully guessing the secret answer for her email account, deduced from the stack of information they uncovered.

Or phishing her with a fake email, depending on who you listen to.

They then made her videos private, uploading a video warning her to never post another video again. This attracted 1000 comments within an hour and became the most commented video of the day on Youtube. So that brought it to an end, in theory. They had removed the ‘cancer’.

So after all that, was the ‘chemo’ even effective? No, not really. A look at /b/ will reveal Boxxy threads are still being posted. By essentially martyring the Boxxy meme, CBRC have simply created a new groundswell of people willing to troll with her image, as well as genuine resentment at their actions. 

Now she has her name, age, dozens of photos, school, internet accounts, alleged phone numbers, and alleged location available online, along with the details of several uninvolved friends. Nobody could have predicted she would create so much chaos, not least Boxxy herself. She had no idea what she was getting herself into by posting a response video.

This entire debacle ultimately stems from those who spammed /b/ with her image and pissed off so many people.

The lesson for all of us here, obvious as it is, is to think about what you divulge online. Is your Myspace secure? Is your Facebook account private? What forum accounts contain your details, and can they be traced and linked to each other? Everything you write online can potentially be linked, as if it were a jigsaw, and a profile of your life built up. I know plenty of people who have publicly viewable Facebook accounts containing their D.O.B, phone numbers, emails, addresses, places they work, go to college and so on. This is lunacy. This is asking for trouble. Boxxy didn’t do this, yet was still tracked down. 

“First, we, CBCR, pretty much made all the breakthroughs in the investigation. I don't care if it sounds arrogant, but if you look through our now-leaked dox, you can see that everything that was found on 4chan was found by us beforehand.”

Give people anonymity, and they become de-individuated, whether it be on an image board or in a rioting mob.

he same internet machine that could propel you to the top of the Youtube charts and hand you online fame will happily chew you up and spit you back out just as quickly, with zero remorse or consideration for the consequences. This is the reality of the internet today, this case is not the first, and surely not the last.

A few examples of fakes:www.youtube.com/user/boxxiebabee  www.youtube.com/user/therealboxxybabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxxxybabeee www.youtube.com/user/boxxyfriendsonly www.youtube.com/user/B0xxxybabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxybaabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxybabee2 www.youtube.com/user/thenewboxxybabee

And of course:www.youtube.com/user/Boxxyakamoldybread 

P.P.S Some distasteful and blatantly fake photoshopped news items are being posted on /b/ claiming Boxxy is dead. The fakes are very poorly written and contain numerous flaws. Again, don’t be fooled.

It's Friday January 16th. On Youtube, the user 'boxxybabee', has 21,800 subscribers, 1.4 million video views and over 38,000 comments on her videos and channel, yet she only signed up 8 days ago, and has only 3 videos. Many people were, and are confused. How did this happen? By documenting what I personally saw, I will show you.

The story essentially begins back in April 2006 when 'Boxxy' joined the anime forum/game based site Gaia Online under the username 'M o l d yLunchboxx'. It appears Boxxy returned from a Gaia hiatus at the very end of 2007, and embarked on a posting spree which lasted a week. It was during this first week of January 2008 that she made two Youtube videos for two fellow Gaia users, '4DM1RALAWESOME' and another referred to simply as 'Ant'.

Boxxy's last login to Youtube was February 2008, and for Gaia Online, April 2008.

The story now takes a leap forward to December 27th, 2008, when, according to Encyclopedia Dramatica, the video 'FOAR 4DD1 FRUM BOXXY' was posted on i-am-bored.com. This was spotted by someone at 7chan, who embedded the video at the top of the random '/b/' board. 

This writer first saw FOAR 4DD1 on January 3rd, 2009, when the video was posted as a 'you rage you lose thread' on the /b/ board at 4chan, with the 'Expert' level afforded to those who would withstand the entire video without wanting to tear out their hair or hurt small animals. /b/tards saw what has been labelled 'the most insane display we've ever seen on youtube' and 'the cutest girl you've ever seen'. This was the true start of the Boxxy phenomenon.

Over the next couple of days, interest grew, and Boxxy threads began to populate /b/. Why have her videos lain virtually unviewed and untouched for 51 weeks only to be brought up now. Who was this girl? What was the cause of her unique behaviour - her vivacious mannerisms, head bobbing, jaw grinding, random accents and rambling? Was she really 21 as her profile stated? Speculation began. Some pulled out their wikiPHD and speculated, tourettes? ADHD? Drug abuse - cocaine, ecstacy, meth? No, just too much coffee, according to others, or simple acting up to the camera. Comparisons to Zed from Police Academy and Heath Ledger's Joker were immediate.

Regardless, a split already began to emerge at /b/. Half of /b/ appeared smitten, captivated by this pretty, wacky girl drenched in eyeliner, but the rest were having their patience tested. Whilst a group of /b/tards declared 'Operation Valkyrie' on Boxxy - intending to find, raid and destroy as much as possible - youtube, myspace, facebook, photobuckets, etc in search of an identity and the 'upper boob' sign mentioned in 41DD, others simply sat and dismayed at the whole effort. Why try and raid the accounts of someone who hasn't logged into any known accounts for almost a year? Many /b/tards resented the obsession with someone who was not only inactive, but a Gaiafag, emo and a camwhore to boot. As one naysayer put it, it was: 'proof that /b/ is full of 13 y.o boys'.

The known accounts, Youtube and Gaia, were quickly spammed with the Operation Valkyrie tag. Via analysis of so called 'Gaiafaggotry' forum posts, /b/tards extracted two pictures of Boxxy from her Gaia friends photobucket accounts, and threw out possible names.

On January 6th, someone claiming to be Boxxy posted two previously unseen photos on /b/. A troll, surely? The same day, her Youtube account disappeared and her Gaia account became inaccessible to the public. Was this the real Boxxy intervening, or simply trolls posting photos from photobucket under her guise, and hacking into her accounts and shutting them down? It was also on the 6th that a clearly fake Youtube account was created - 'Boxxyakamoldybread'. Even though the videos are clearly of lower resolution than the originals, some were fooled by this, and some probably still are.

The 'boxxy lovers' of 4chan were by now declaring her the 'Queen of /b/' and a instant new meme. The haters labelled this as a perfect example of a forced meme. To them, she was the epitome of the 'cancer killing /b/'. Battle lines were being drawn.

On the 9th, Boxxy delivered. She addressed 'recent events', said she was in fact free of drugs and personality disorders, and proved it actually was her posting her photos on /b/. Whilst /b/tards were scrambling to find her identity and spamming her accounts, she was there, watching.

his interest generated over 70,000 views within 12 hours, pushing the video onto the first page for most viewed of the day on Youtube.

Identical chaos was occurring at 7chan, with the /b/ first page 100% filled with Boxxy at some points. On the 10th, with Boxxy now approaching 400,000 views and 10,000 subscribers, Operation Clampdown was declared. If Moot did not ban the users spamming boxxy threads on the 4chan /b/, the site would be brought down via a DDOS. 

On the 12th, Youtube 'celeb' Sxephil included Boxxy in the intro for his new video, and used her face as the thumbnail. Personally, I found it extremely cynical of Phil, a Youtube partner who makes money from views, to advertise his extremely boring video about Joe the Plumber with Boxxy's face. What a dick. Worse still, the exposure to his 310,000 subscribers sent several thousand more people to the Boxxy videos.

There are many patently absurd theories about Boxxy. If you listen to the drooling idiocy leaking through the interweb, you'll be told she is in fact an actress hired by Gaia Online to promote their product (that's why she says she moved on to bigger and better things, huh, morons?), the whole thing is a giant trolling exercise meticulously planned by her and accomplices, the entire thing was perpertrated by 7chan users attempting to cripple 4chan, she's a paid actress akin to lonelygirl15, or most bizarrely of all, a claim has been put forward that she is a fraud mocking the mannerisms of a 15 year old girl who lives in Chicago, orchestrated by said girl's obsessed crush who is angry at his unrequited love. Some people actually believe this.Well, there you have it. That's pretty much what happened.

STIGMATIZED IDENTITIES McKenna & Bargh (1998) reasoned that people with stigmatized social identities (see Frable 1993, Jones et al. 1984), such as homosexuality or fringe political beliefs, should be motivated to join and participate in Internet groups devoted to that identity, because of the relative anonymity and thus safety of Internet (compared to face-to-face) participation and the scarcity of such groups in "real life." Moreover, because it is their only venue in which to share and discuss this aspect of their identity, membership in the group should be quite important to these people, and so the norms of such groups should exert a stronger than usual influence over members' behavior. This prediction was confirmed by an archival and observational study of the frequency with which stigmatized-group members posted messages to (i.e., participated in) the group: Unlike in other Internet groups, participation increased when there was positive feedback from the other group members and decreased following negative feedback (McKenna & Bargh 1998, Study 1).

ON-LINE SUPPORT In harmony with these conclusions, Davison et al. (2000) studied the provision and seeking of social support on-line by those with grave illnesses, and found that people used Internet support groups particularly for embarrassing, stigmatized illnesses such as AIDS and prostate cancer (and also, understandably, for those illnesses that limit mobility such as multiple sclerosis). The authors point out that because of the anxiety and uncertainty they are feeling, patients are highly motivated by social comparison needs to seek out others with the same illness (p. 213), but prefer to do this on-line when the illness is an embarrassing, disfiguring, or otherwise stigmatized one, because of the anonymity afforded by Internet groups (p. 215).

Accordingly, Kang (2000) has argued that one potential social benefit of the Internet is to disrupt the reflexive operation of racial stereotypes, as racial anonymity is much easier to maintain on-line than off-line. For example, studies have found that African Americans and Hispanics pay more than do white consumers for the same car, but these price differences disappear if the car is instead purchased on-line (Scott Morton et al. 2003).

Yet racism itself is socially stigmatized-especially when it comes to extreme forms such as advocacy of white supremacy and racial violence (see McKenna & Bargh 1998, Study 3). Thus the cloak of relative anonymity afforded by the Internet can also be used as a cover for racial hate groups, especially for those members who are concerned about public disapproval of their beliefs; hence today there are more than 3000 websites containing racial hatred, agendas for violence, and even bomb-making instructions (Lee & Leets 2002). Glaser et al. (2002) infiltrated such a group and provide telling examples of the support and encouragement given by group members to each other to act on their hatreds. All things considered, then, we don't know yet whether the overall effect of the Internet will be a positive or a negative one where racial and ethnic divisions are concerned.

People are not passively affected by technology, but actively shape its use and influence (Fischer 1992, Hughes & Hans 2001). The Internet has unique, even transformational qualities as a communication channel, including relative anonymity and the ability to easily link with others who have similar interests, values, and beliefs. Research has found that the relative anonymity aspect encourages self-expression, and the relative absence of physical and nonverbal interaction cues (e.g., attractiveness) facilitates the formation of relationships on other, deeper bases such as shared values and beliefs. At the same time, however, these "limited bandwidth" features of Internet communication also tend to leave a lot unsaid and unspecified, and open to inference and interpretation.

As Lea & Spears (1995) and O'Sullivan (1996) have noted, studying how relationships form and are maintained on the Internet brings into focus the implicit assumptions and biases of our traditional (face-to-face) relationship and communication research literatures (see Cathcart & Gumpert 1983)-most especially the assumptions that face-to-face interactions, physical proximity, and nonverbal communication are necessary and essential to the processes of relating to each other effectively. By providing an alternative interaction setting in which interactions and relationships play by somewhat different rules, and have somewhat different outcomes, the Internet sheds light on those aspects of face-to-face interaction that we may have missed all along. Tyler (2002), for example, reacting to the research findings on Internet interaction, wonders whether it is the presence of physical features that makes face-to-face interaction what it is, or is it instead the immediacy of responses (compared to e-mail)? That's a question we never knew to ask before.

Spears et al. (2002) contrasted the engineering model with the "social science" perspective on the Internet, which assumes instead that personal goals and needs are the sole determinant of its effects. [In the domain of communications research, Blumler & Katz's (1974) "uses and gratifications" theory is an influential version of this approach.] According to this viewpoint, the particular purposes of the individuals within the communication setting determine the outcome of the interaction, regardless of the particular features of the communication channel in which the interaction takes place.The third and most recent approach has been to focus on the interaction between features of the Internet communication setting and the particular goals and needs of the communicators, as well as the social context of the interaction setting (see Bargh 2002, McKenna & Bargh 2000, Spears et al. 2002). According to this perspective, the special qualities of Internet social interaction do have an impact on the interaction and its outcomes, but this effect can be quite different depending on the social context. With these three guiding models in mind, we turn to a review of the relevant research.

A quick glimpse of the table confirms our prediction that Japanese people would prefer to discuss or voice their opinions when there is a lack of identifiability. The US Slashdot has a much lower rate of anonymous cowards, indicating a preference to be identifiable. For the most active topics, 25% of comments on average were made as anonymous coward in the US, compared to 69% in Japan.

Due to the industrialization and modernization of the past several decades, changes in social and economic structure have inevitably caused East Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea, to become more westernized. Due to this fact, some argue that Japan should not be considered as an exemplar of collectivistic societies (Takano and Osaka 1999). Yet the striking cultural differences, in the normative degree of anonymity, found in this study suggests that there continues to be a difference between Eastern and Western cultures in how people are motivated to seek and interact with others online.