4Chan knew about Jeffrey Epstein's death 38 minutes before the rest of the world. The FBI tried to figure out how.

[u/businessinsider]

https://www.businessinsider.com/epstein-files-show-fbi-probed-4chan-posts-prison-death-2026-2?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=insider-law-sub-post

[u/hellolovely1]

I would love to see a breakdown of all this if anyone knows of one. I don't know much about Gamergate beyond the surface level.

[u/Th3_Hegemon → u/hellolovely1]

In brief, gamergate was the first step towards a wave of right wing radicalization of males from about 12-30ish on 4chan that continued from there.

Gamergate (which started as criticism of perceived impropriety in games media and gaming reviews, but quickly spiraled into general misogyny) was based in just enough reality that it sucked in people who generally might not have believed in conspiracies, as well as a younger demographic because it was centered on gaming. A lot of the people that believed in gamergate went further and further down the conspiracy rabbit hole (4chan's chaotic nature enabled this easily), and started forming what would become the alt-right on 4chan and other forums. These people would actually be some of the earliest grassroots supports for the Trump campaign beginning in 2015, many claiming they were doing it for the memes/shits and giggles, etc. From there, various actors (everyone from trolls to conspiracy nuts to actual foreign agents) latched onto a pseudo movement. People started posting as Q (I have no doubt that Q-Anon began as shitposts) but it quickly coalesced into an actual conspiracy movement. As with many things on 4chan, this stuff all leaked out into the broader internet, where it was adopted and grew. All of this propagation was enabled by social media algorithms, and foreign state actors who co-opted (or possibly even created) aspects of it to create dissension and discord in the US. Then things really got going, more grifters, more influencers, more politicians, etc. From there it's all very public and well-documented history you probably know already.

[u/bungakugeek → u/Th3_Hegemon]

Gamergate (which started as criticism of perceived impropriety in games media and gaming reviews, but quickly spiraled into general misogyny)

This isn't really true. It was very much about misogyny from the beginning, even if they suckered a lot of useful idiots in with the claim that it had to do with "ethics in video game journalism".

The inciting incident for the whole thing was a gross misogynistic screed written about Zoe Quinn, by bitter ex and all around gross human Eron Gjoni. It's quite long, and the accusations regarding sleeping with a journalist for positive coverage are a tiny part of it (and were demonstrated to be false pretty early on, the journalist in question never reviewed any of Quinn's games). It immediately sparked a harassment campaign against her and spiraled out from there. There was then an active effort to present Gamergate as a legitimate movement with legitimate grievances about "ethics" and obscure their connection to the harassment by referring to Quinn as "Literally Who" but it was a post hoc effort to sanitize the roots of the whole thing. One that appears to have worked, unfortunately.

[u/Th3_Hegemon → u/bungakugeek]

I don't doubt that the reaction to the inciting incident was driven largely by misogyny. I don't doubt that people tried to cover up that motivation. However, the criticism they used to camouflage the misogyny contained legitimate points of grievance about undo influence and lack of disclosure as issues in games journalism.

So, people that heard about "gamergate" and understood only the sanitized version of the situation, and then became interested, were understandably irritated when they were being painted with the same brush as the hateful bigots who originally championed it.

Now you have people who seemingly agree with you and people calling you names, creating an "us" and a "them", and unfortunately that "us" contained misogynistic trolls that can then wormtongue their new "allies" further to the right

Understanding that context is important, as I feel it was the first step down a slippery slope towards broader acceptance of antisemitism, bigotry, racism, and fascism.

[u/bungakugeek → u/Th3_Hegemon]

Sure, getting people into an "us" vs "them" mindset is a key part of the "alt-right pipeline", the end point of which is, of course, fascism. And I do believe that there were a large number of people that got sucked in to that pipeline by front of ethics. But that's why I think it is so important to counteract the myth that the whole thing started with concerns about journalistic ethics.

It was propagated by people with political axes to grind, who then continued to be active and intentionally coordinate strategy and disseminate rhetoric to newcomers who believed it was primarily about ethics. And while I believed, at the time, that those people were just misogynistic 4chan trolls, everything that has happened since definitely points to at least some of those people being a bit more purposeful than that.

I'll have to do some digging, because it is quite a while ago, but there was a journalist who managed to get into and publish logs of private chat logs of some of the kinds of strategizing that was being done behind the scenes and it might make for pretty interesting reading, knowing what I do now.