When people plan to do or have done horrible things in Japan, 2chan is sometimes where they earn their 15 minutes of infamy. Hiroyuki was famously—and successfully—sued for defamation involving posts on 2chan. Years after rulings that allegedly ordered him to pay out over a half-million dollars, he still hadn’t handed over the cash by 2008. In an interview with Shukan Post, he even boasts of ignoring the lawsuits and not paying compensation.
“Yes, that’s correct. I’ve received more than 100 lawsuits so far. The reason why I don’t pay compensation is that I think I am not responsible for what others post,” he said. “If I were posting death threats or whatever, then I must pay. But I’m just a manager of 2ch. I don’t feel guilty at all.”
I think they're inferring that Anonymous came from 4chan. I can't confirm that it actually did, but I know that there were some people who claimed to be Anon members when I was browsing /b/ back in the day. Who knows on an anonymous message board, right?
Anonymous was by definition an Anonymous poster on an image board. In its early form as anything resembling vaguely a "group" that does things (it wasn't a "group" quite) there were raids/trolls against targets for the lulz. A pure and simple time. Later, a touch of morality came into play, and Anon used their skills to attack those who deserved it rather than simply those yielding the most lulz, leading us to the campaign against the Church of Scientology. After this, Anon was more and more oriented toward some attitude of just revenge or sometimes destructively discouraging a behavior, instead of just fucking with people. "Moralfags" and "Moralfaggotry" were the words of the day.
Because Anon is not really one well-defined group from one place, there never will be any good consistency in what it looks like Anon as a whole stands for.
4chan certainly did not "create the existence of the net troll", which somehow this writer is supposing to be exclusive to the idea of Anonymous, but when they say it spawned social justice movements, they might mean the involvement of moot and 4chan in GamerGate and the social justice movement, by no means a "spawning" (of the movement -- though maybe, in part, they spawned GamerGate) but significant in that it apparently led to the thrashing death of 4chan. If by spawning social justice movements they mean raids/attacks "for justice", then sure, but the Social Justice movement isn't one of the things Anon was really anywhere near agreed about. I never really got into the whole thing (I was busy on 7chan, TOTSE, SA) but these should tell you enough, albeit with some bias:
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/GamerGate#m00t.27s_GamerGate_Sellout
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/4chan#4chan_is_kill
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/4chan#January_2015_-_Final_sellout_and_le_cuck_est_mort
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/4chan#September_2015_-_The_End_Two_-_Electric_Boogaloo
- Japanese police sources are worried that some of 2chan’s sordid history of death, destruction, and evading justice could come to its American counterpart.
I appreciate when 'technology culture' writers tell the reader they didn't do their research right off the bat.
The author isn't making a distinction between 2ch, the imageboard that Hiroyuki created, and 2chan, the imageboard that was the inspiration for 4chan.