Inside 4chan’s top-secret moderation machine

On May 14, 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron sent out a link to a select group of online friends. It was an invite to a private Twitch stream, access to his running online diary, and an upload of his 180-page manifesto.

Those who clicked the link saw Gendron sitting in his car, in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. They watched as he lifted his AR-15-style rifle, equipped with a high-capacity magazine, and opened fire. He killed 10 people in just six minutes.

Even before police stopped the massacre and arrested Gendron, the link was being posted to the anonymous imageboard 4chan. On /pol/, the site’s “politically incorrect” board, people commented in real time on the mass shooting. “Why not shoot up the abortion rallys? What a faggot,” one user wrote. Another chimed in: “The kids manifesto is actually pretty good.” Dozens of people who missed the livestream demanded a recording. Others declared it a deep-state false flag operation.

One poster, however, was imploring the site’s users to accept responsibility. “Why is this place so full of hate and anger?” they asked. “It's like a den of inequity [sic]. Why don't you people ever express love or compassion?” They uploaded a photo of Payton Gendron, and named the file “the 4chan killer.”

“You made Payton Gentron [sic], a sociopathic mass murderer,” they wrote.

4chan’s moderators soon jumped in and banned the user's account, deleting their comment. The reason for the ban: “Complaining about 4chan.”

The way in which 4chan is managed and moderated is of growing interest among US government officials. The US House of Representatives' January 6 committee subpoenaed 4chan over its role in facilitating the assault on the US Capitol, while investigators with the New York Attorney General’s Office ordered the company to turn over thousands of records to better understand its role in Gendron’s terrorist attack. WIRED obtained a number of internal 4chan documents through a public records request.

Those documents show how 4chan’s team of moderators—janitors, in their own nomenclature—manage the site. Internal emails, chat logs, and moderation decisions reveal how the site’s janitors have helped shape it in their own image, using their moderation powers to engender 4chan’s particular brand of edgelord white supremacy. In particular, the documents show how the site’s moderators responded to a wave of attention as their website had, once more, been cited as an ideological driver for an act of mass murder.

More than that, the documents lay bare the degree to which 4chan’s toxic influence is a design, not a bug.

In his manifesto, Gendron credited 4chan with showing him “the truth”—that is, a deeply paranoid and racist belief that “the White race is dying out.” He selected the Tops supermarket specifically because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. 4chan, too, told him what to do about it. Years earlier, browsing the site, he had come across a video of 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant stalking through the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, murdering 51 people.

In launching the attack in Buffalo, Gendron was following in Tarrant’s footsteps. He even liberally plagiarized Tarrant’s manifesto. And he made regular use of 4chan’s insular, hateful lexicon of memes and in-jokes.

While Gendron has pled guilty to murder, domestic terrorism, and hate crimes charges, and is awaiting trial on additional federal charges, the families of some of the victims have filed a lawsuit against a number of social media companies, including 4chan, Discord, Reddit, Snapchat, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. They allege that Gendron’s radicalization was caused by an inability, or outright refusal, by these companies to stem the flow of violent conspiracy theories online.