Do not talk about anonymous, censura, autocensura e anonimato nelle periferie del Web

This paper is part of the collective effort that sees many semoticians increasingly applying their analytic tools to the Internet, in order to give birth to an authentic “semiotics of the Web”, capable of shedding some light one our time’s most interesting medium. In particular I deploy the tools of Lotman’s semiotics of culture in order to approach censorship in the peripheries of the Web — the galaxy of forums and imageboards (like the infamous 4han ) that refuse all connection betweens the Web and real life and defends personal iden- tity online through the rigid use of anonymity. A textual analysis of an Internet meme, the Rules of the Internet, a sort of constitution of these peripheries, and its connections with censorship, is the starting point for a brief investigation on the community of taste (Landowski) that gathers in such sites. This community, also labelled as A–culture (Auerbach), appears to be extremely playful (some- times even in a violent way) and to consider the whole Web as a playground. Censorship therefore, along with other strategies, is exploited as a mean to protect a certain semiotic domain , the playful one, from those who try to erase the distinction between online and offline life–styles (among which the giants Facebook and Google).