Hispachan

About

Hispachan (site domain: hispachan.org)^[1] is a Spanish-language imageboard community that serves as an alternative to 4chan for Hispanic users from all over the world, including Europe and the Americas.

History

Hispachan was launched in November 2012 as the international hub for users of various Spanish-speaking imageboard communities, such as Mexico's Sectachan, Chile's 6-chan and Puerto Rico's Puertochan. Whereas most previous image boards devoted to Hispanic users were sectioned by their geographical or regional identities, Hispachan distinguished itself as a global imageboard for all Spanish-speaking users, which helped its community to grow rapidly over a relatively short of period of time. The administrator(s) and founder(s) of the imageboard is only known as "Zeta," whose identity and nationality remain unknown (shown below, left); its official logo is ñ (the letter "n" with a tilde), which is considered the most representative character in Spanish alphabet (shown below). Hispachan is the world's largest anonymous imageboard on the Spanish-speaking web with more than 17 million posts (as of July 2019).

Features

Boards

Highlights

From its beginning, Hispachan has been involved in several controversies and cyberattack incidents, many of which have been covered by news media outlets in the Spanish-speaking countries.

• In 2013, a neo-Nazi group used Hispachan to coordinate hate crimes and organize other acts of violence against homosexuals in Spain. After several videos of the group assaulting gays in Catalonia, Spain surfaced online, the Catalan police (Mossos d'Esquadra) launched an investigation into the incident and arrested the suspects. Meanwhile, Spain's judicial authorities requested the imageboard to remove all discussion threads related to the case.^[7]

• In April 2014, a group of anonymous hackers leaked the sequence keys to access the control panel of the official website for Isabel Allende, Chile's President of Senate, on Hispachan. As a result of the breach, the website was vandalized with images of memes and shock content.

• In May 2014, a group of Hispachan users created a fake online child escort agency to lure in pedophiles. The profile information of dozens of individuals who inquired about the service were disclosed and reported to the authorities.^[6]

• In March 2015, National Chilean TV channel TVN's TV show #Viral featured Hispachan, along with several screenshots of activities on the imageboard, as an example of a "website where pedophiles share experiences and resources".^[11]

• In May 2015, some Hispachan users were found responsible for cyberbullying and harassing feminist and lesbian activists. The case was reported on by various news outlets in Latin America.^[5]

• In December 2015, Raúl Robles, a Mexican hacker and cybersecurity consultant for the Mexican government, was murdered in Guadalajara. This led the local authorities to launch an investigation into various death threats that had been made against Robles prior to his death on Hispachan, due to the fact that the time and the place of the crime matched up precisely with one of the threats posted on the site.^[3][9][12]

• In December 2015, hackers from Hispachan's /ve/ board (Venezuela) gained access to the website of Cantv, Venezuela's largest internet service provider, to complain about the poor quality of its high-speed internet service. The website was vandalized with the logo of Hispachan and a humorous song about Hugo Chávez, which subsequently became a trending topic in the Venezuelan social media.^[4]

• In March 2016, Hiroyuki Nishimura, the creator of 2channel and administrator of 4chan, participated in an "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) session on Hispachan.

• In April 2016, a Hispachan user created a hoax terrorist website on the Deep Web, threatening several countries of imminent attacks with a countdown clock. After drawing the attention of the social media and the news outlets, the homepage of the website displayed the message "Has sido trolleado por Hispachan" (English: "You have been trolled by Hispachan") and "Amarillismo no es igual a periodismo" (English: "Sensationalism is not journalism").

• In November 2016, hackers from /cl/ board (Chile) hacked and vandalized the website of Salvador Allende Foundation with pornographic images of the chilean leader.

• In January 2017, a Hispachan user created a thread warning that he would do a massacre and then he would commit suicide. He said that there would be "a lot of blood", it would be "shown on TV", and it would be in Mexico. The next day it happened. Federico Guevara shot his teacher and some of his classmates at school, in Monterrey (Mexico), and after that, he commited suicide.^{[17] [18]}

• A number of popular YouTube personalities in the Spanish-speaking world have been known to lurk or participate on the imageboard community, including Dross (shown below). However, the majority of Hispachan users have expressed disapproval of their official presence as they break the principle of anonymity.

• Hispachan /pol/, /ve/ and /es/ users are known for their passionate conversations about the political situation in the Spanish-speaking countries, as there's notable political instability in countries like Spain or Venezuela at present. See image timestamped next to Pablo Iglesias – Spanish politician candidate for the presidency of Spain – below.

• From March to November 2018 Hispachan remained "paused" due to personal issues of the administrator Zeta and the slow development of the new script "Hispagold", specially created for Hispachan.^[13]

• In February 2019 Hispachan users boycotted the funding of Nido.org, network dedicated to share child pornography and "revenge porn"^[21]. Due to this, the network administrator committed suicide.

• In June 2019 Vice Magazine accused Hispachan of being a "collaborative misogyny" website^[19] and started a signature petition to close the site, which didn't succeed.^[20]

Traffic

Hispachan is ranked 26,912 worldwide and it's in the top 1,000 in countries like Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Spain (May 2016).^[2] According to Alexa Rank, it is also the 5th most active imageboard on the internet.

Search Interest

External References