N-tower

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About

N-tower or N-word Tower is a social media practice of spelling out the slur "nigger" letter by letter by a group of six people, with each user posting one letter, which allows circumventing hate speech detection systems in place. The practice may involve each user posting one letter of the slur, posting sentences or words that start with the corresponding letter or posting images that depict each of the letters in order.

Origin

The exact first occurrence of several users combing efforts to spell out a slur on social media to circumvent a ban due to individual letters not triggering algorithms is unknown. However, the practice first gained attention online in early 2019 on Twitter and 4chan. For example, on February 7th, 2019, co-founder and CEO of Twitter^[1] Jack Dorsey tweeted the letter N in reply to another user, with two more users following up with letters I and G (screenshot shown below, left).^[2] On March 11th, 2019, anonymous 4chan^[3] users in /pol/ posted an N-tower out of letters taken from university logos (shown below, center). On March 20th, 2019, 4chan^[4] users collectively spelled out the slur in a /fit/ thread (shown below, right).

Spread

Throughout 2019, the practice achieved significant spread on 4chan and Twitter as users collectively spelled out the slur and used images with letters to spell it. For example, on April 26th, 2019, an anonymous 4chan^[5] user posted an N-tower based on an image of Barack Obama captioned "N" taken from Joe Biden's Instagram. On December 1st, 2019, a 4chan^[6] user made a post explaining what an N-tower is (shown below).

On September 26th, 2020, Twitter^[7] user @TheHinduDindu tweeted a warning that Twitter has been banning people who participate in collective spelling, with the tweet gaining over 320 retweets and 3,100 likes prior to being removed (tweet shown below). On September 28th, a screenshot of the tweet was posted to 4chan's /pol/^[8] board with the post gaining over 50 replies in roughly two years. On October 1st, 2020, iFunny^[9] user iGvza posted the screenshot, gaining over 200 smiles on the app in roughly two years.

FemBrick @TheHindu Dindu PSA: twitter is now banning people for participating in N towers be warned, gentlemen 2:03 pm 26 Sep 20 Twitter Web App 325 Retweets 92 Quote Tweets 3,150 Likes 27 FemBrick @TheHinduDindu 1d a friend of mine copped a 7 day ban for "hateful conduct" for posting an "I" 26 43 985 ●

Despite the claim, the practice of creating N-towers continued in comments on Twitter,^[10] YouTube^[11] and other social media websites in the following years.

Dr. Neo Cortex

In 2019, on the internet culture and meme documentation website GotFunnyPictures, the practice of creating N-word towers and spelling other words with edited images of the character Dr. Neo Cortex from the Crash Bandicoot video game franchise gained prevalence among users.