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This week, the internet’s most odious imageboard, 4chan, was hacked.
The site, where some of the web’s worst memes, trends, and movements percolated before blowing up, is currently down.
While the hack drew headlines, actual internal data from the site has only slowly dripped out.
A list of volunteers and moderators, along with their email addresses, was posted to a rival image board. There have also been unverified claims that the still unknown hackers pilfered a list of paid subscribers to the site, but that data has not been released.
And in the absence of a mass dataset the internet hoped for, fake claims have filled the void.
4chan hack sparks disinformation spread
Initially, people online alleged that the list of moderator emails exposed government employees working for the site. A review of the data by the Daily Dot showed some .edu emails, but none from a .gov account.
But the biggest claim is that the hack of 4chan proved the site, long known for its virulent antisemitism, was actually a psy-op by the IDF.
A screenshot, which floated 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 post on X.
The rumor spread 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 see more derogatory terms for Jewish people in a single thread than you’ve heard in your life. Which, according to this conspiracy… 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 built some 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 screenshot painted 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 psyop designed to smear Israel.
The post appears to be a screengrab from 4plebs, a volunteer-run archive of 4chan. Though the Daily Dot could not track down the specific screenshot being shared, users on 4chan often pulled that data into posts and shared the numbers.
That data tracks with the graphics of the post, the same countries in the same order, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada make up the top of the site’s user base.
Israel doesn’t appear anywhere in the data on 4plebs, because the image going around is a photoshop that 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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