Results: Google Hires 4chan Founder Chris Poole

The founder of online forum 4chan is moving on to Google. The search giant told Business Insider that Poole has been hired to work under Google's vice president of Google Photos and Streams, Bradley Horowitz. In a subsequent blog post, Poole confirmed the news, saying that he is hoping to build a vibrant online community at Google. "I can't wait to contribute my own experience from a dozen years of building online communities, and to begin the next chapter of my career at such an incredible company," he wrote. Poole is best known for founding 4chan, a controverisal online forum that allows users to post content to the site anonymously. While 4chan has been used for quite a bit of good, it's also been charged with spreading violent and sometimes illegal content. Indeed, it's the service's anonymity that makes 4chan both appealing to users and potentially dangerous. Poole has been voted among some of the most influential online figures, and was instrumental in growing 4chan into one of the most popular websites on the Internet. He stepped down as the site's administrator in 2015, however, and announced that Hiroyuki Nishimura had acquired the service. Nishimura is best known for founding 2channel, a forum-based precursor to 4chan. Naturally, news that someone from 4chan was joining Google raised some eyebrows. Is he just trolling us all? But Poole did develop a website, called Canvas, that allows users to share and remix images, so joining Google's photos and streams operation might not be too much of a stretch. Either way, Poole is coming to Google, and he says he looks forward to contributing to the company's "intelligence, passion, and enthusiasm." Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.