Did 4Chan’s Hack Just Unmask Racist Trolls in High Places?
The website 4chan was first founded in 2003 by web developer Christopher “Moot” Poole as an English-language equivalent to the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, commonly called 2chan as “futaba” is Japanese for “double leaf.”
Though the website was founded as a place to discuss Japanese anime cartoons, within a year, users began posting actual child pornography on the site, thanks to the site’s moderation ranging from loose to just about non-existent. As a result, legal threats flew, and the site’s founder was forced to delete 4chan’s lolikon board, which was a meeting place for fans of Japanese manga centered on young, hypersexualized female protagonists.
Throughout 2006 and 2007, many 4chan users were involved in activism against white supremacy, such as cyberattacks against noted neo-Nazi Hal Turner. One group that spawned from 4chan’s primordial ooze was Anonymous, the infamous hactivist collective that has gone after the notoriously hateful Westboro Baptist Church, the Ku Klux Klan and people guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl from Steubenville, Ohio, along with those who helped cover up the crime. However, in 2014, 4chan became the incubator for the misogynist Gamergate movement, a coordinated online harassment campaign targeting women in the video game industry. Shortly afterward, the site became a popular online hangout for the racist alt-right movement, and these users vehemently supported Donald Trump’s first successful campaign for President of the United States. After a while, the ensuing controversy became too much for Moot to handle, and he resigned as head administrator in January 2015.
Conspiracy theories that inspired and gave way to the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021, in response to Trump’s defeat in the previous election, also originated on 4chan. Even more tragically, the extreme right-wing radicalization on 4chan served as the catalyst for a pair of consecutive spree shootings in New Zealand at different mosques in 2019 and the massacre of ten Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York three years later. Both perpetrators were frequent visitors to 4chan.
Unsurprisingly, many users and advertisers have boycotted 4chan over the years, frequently making the site vulnerable to financial strain.
On April 15th, 2025, Reuters reported that posts were circulated online claiming that 4chan was hacked. At the time, the site was experiencing sporadic outages, sometimes for hours at a time. In between outages, the message “U GOT HACKED” was prominently displayed across the top of the page. Screenshots of 4chan’s backend infrastructure originated at rival messageboard Soyjak.st and were circulated throughout cyberspace.
According to accounts from Vice and TechCrunch, the hack has the scope to expose the people who monitor the forums on which racist alt-right rhetoric is posted. Vice further reports that while some moderators had the prudence to use sock-puppet email accounts, others used their primary handles and servers. Even more worrisome, some of those emails end in .edu and .gov.
In the case of the latter, it seems it might be not out of the question that there may be people in legislature at the local, state and/or federal level – possibly in high profile positions – spreading chintzy white supremacist memes. It seems that 4chan has given racist white failsons a sense of community and a place to go and be their uninhibited selves the same way the Ku Klux Klan has done on and off since the end of the Civil War. In fact, many people in both houses of Congress were also Klansmen, especially during the century between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Acts. Given the fact that Donald Trump has once again found himself in a position to legitimize performative racism, I’d be surprised if nobody in Congress or the Senate ends up outed in the leak, considering that there are senators and representatives who, if not identifiably part of the alt-right movement, certainly have enough views in common with it to gain credibility among its supporters.
A low-ranking admin from 4chan says to TechCrunch, “4chan’s moderation team has had leaks in the past, but this is obviously an issue of greater magnitude. I’m not happy about the situation. I’m sure most others aren’t, either. But many of us have been doing this for a long time. Doxxing is a longstanding pastime on 4chan, and the possibility that we could be exposed has always been there.”
In other words, live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak.
In a discussion with Wired, Emiliano De Cristofaro, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of California, Riverside, offers a grim prognosis in the aftermath of the hack. “It might be hard or at least painfully slow and costly for 4chan to recover from this,” he remarks, “so we might really see the end of 4chan as we know it.”
Unfortunately, even if 4chan does not survive this hack, this probably will not mean the end of the spread of racism via the net, especially as long as Elon Musk still owns X.com. Even if a cyberattack kills 4chan stone cold, there’s likely to be someone or a few people among the millions of visitors to the site who can and probably will set up a brand new messageboard purpose-tailored for racist trolls. Just like with law enforcement and the illicit drug trade, if hackers clamp down on the racist trolls at 4chan and drive that site out of business in the bargain, the racist trolls will simply find another place to gather or even build one of their own, and the whole steaming pile of shit will start up all over again.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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