MANILA, Philippines – With a modest crowdfunding goal of US$2,000 (P80,000), hacktivist group Anonymous hoped to spin off its Your Anon News (YAN) Twitter and Tumblr accounts into a full-fledged news website.

With the backing of more than 1,300 people on crowdfunding website IndieGoGo, Anonymous has surpassed its modest goal by leaps and bounds, acquiring $54,668 (P2.25M) in funding for this new initiative.

As they state on their now-concluded IndieGoGo campaign page, the goal of the YAN website would be to provide livestreamers and independent journalists with support and a platform to report the news. As their explanation states, “Our goal as YAN contributors will be to take what we have learned over the past few years and create a new environment,” where content will not be determined “solely by external sources.”

The post continues, “We will engineer a new website which will allow us to collect breaking reports and blog postings from the best independent reporters online. We’ll provide feeds for citizen journalists who livestream events as they are taking place, instead of the 10-second sound bites provided by the corporate media.”

What’s notable in this particular development is that Anonymous itself is active in creating news inasmuch as it wants to provide a voice for journalists to provide stories.

Anonymous was recently in the public eye for taking control of a number of North Korean social media accounts and websites, as well as attacking Israeli websites. More recently, Anonymous “brandjacked” the Facebook page of the Westboro Baptist Church for saying it would picket the funerals of people killed in the Boston marathon explosions.

Unlike most news outlets, Anonymous is also seemingly decentralized, maintaining members because of the ideals of the collective and thus making it difficult to determine who is in charge of setting up this particular news website initiative.

Anonymous’ processes may not fall under traditional journalistic practices, as Anonymous is generally critical of traditional news media. Despite this caveat, Your Anon News should provide people in many countries with a voice, whether they’re reporting on uprisings or happenings in parts of the world people might not normally hear about. – Rappler.com