This week, the internet’s most odious imageboard,
4chan, was
hacked.
The site, where some of
the web’s worst memes, trends, and movementspercolated before blowing up, iscurrently down.
While the hack drew headlines,actual internal datafrom the site hasonly slowly dripped out.
A list of volunteers and moderators, along with their email addresses, wasposted to a rival image board. There have also beenunverified claimsthat the still unknown hackers pilfered a list of paid subscribers to the site, but that datahas not been released.
And in theabsence of a mass datasetthe internet hoped for,fake claims have filled the void.
Initially, people online alleged that the list of moderator emailsexposed government employeesworking for the site. Areview of the data by the Daily Dotshowedsome .edu emails, butnone from a .gov account.
But thebiggest claimis that the hack of 4chan proved the site, long known for its virulent antisemitism, wasactually a psy-opby the IDF.
A screenshot, whichfloated on X and migrated to other sites, claims the hacked data reveal that the site’s top posters were all from Israel.
“4chan got hacked and they got the stats from /pol/.. Most of the posts are from Israel,” read
a top poston X.
The rumorspread to sites with audiences ostensibly less prone to jump on nonsense, but the rumor gained prominence there also.
“I have not yet found the 4chan data but what i have found is a pretty upsetting indication that the site has a large israeli user base, particularly in its extremely controversial /pol/ forum,”read a post.
But if it were true,why? Visit 4chan just once and you’ll seemore derogatory terms for Jewish people in a single threadthan you’ve heard in your life. Which, according to thisconspiracy… clearly proves the site is a long-running Mossad operation to stir up hate towards Jewish people that, in the long run, protects them.
“They promote the far right everywhere because they want to stir up hatred of Muslims, and to make Jews think that Israel is the only safe place for them,” the poster wrote.
It’s a long-running conspiracy that antisemites love. Despite the very … proof of antisemitism in their own beliefs, they believe evidence of antisemitism is planted by Jewish people.
But, you might ask, if an elite tech squad out of Israel—a country that builtsome of the world’s most devious spyware—really was running the show, and wanted to astroturf hatred against Jews,wouldn’t they take some steps to cover their tracks?
Well, no because this isn’t public data. This is hacked data. People sharing the screenshotpainted it as private, internal numbers, something the public never was supposed to see.
Except that the idea 4chan is a Jewish psyop is …is itself a psyopdesigned to smear Israel.
The post appears to be ascreengrab from 4plebs, a volunteer-run archive of 4chan. Though the Daily Dotcould not track downthe specific screenshot being shared, users on 4chan often pulled that data into posts and shared the numbers.
That datatracks with the graphics of the post, the same countries in the same order, theUnited States, theUnited Kingdom, andCanadamake up the top of the site’s user base.
Israeldoesn’t appear anywhere in the dataon 4plebs, because the image going around isa photoshopthat plugged them into the top slot.
Israel doesn’t appear anywhere on the list of the top 20 countries, because,as it probably doesn’t need to be explained, most Jewish people probably aren’t logging into 4chan every day to slur themselves.
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