New account don't crucify me! I've lurked for a while, been stewing on this one for a long time, but now is the perfect opportunity to share it with all that's come to light:
I've had a theory for a while about crowdsourced propaganda. It's well understood that 4chan sits at the top of the internet food chain, and memes, narratives, ideas drip down from there to everywhere else. 4chan is able to get away with doing and saying horrendous things, while a site like Kiwifarms gets their service pulled.
Why? I think it is essentially crowdsourcing propaganda.
The way that 4chan operates, as I'm sure you all know, is that people aggregate ideas, iterate on them, and make them more and more spreadable. With the advent of /pol/, suddenly that all became highly politically charged. Basically, by fostering a community of people who say and do the most extreme and eye-catching things, anonymously, they can create untraceable propaganda that adapts on the fly to current events, and only gets more and more eye-catching and extreme.
So they let them do what they do, and then prune, vet, and delete things they don't like, or that go against the message they're trying to push. Due to its anonymous nature, 4chan operates as a sort of post-truth social network, there's no REAL fact-checking or proof, you just have to make something that gets people's attention, and it'll get spread down the pipeline to Reddit, Xitter, all kinds of messageboards, Discords.
This all sounds conspiratorial, but when you take into account that 4chan is apparently being ran and moderated by actual feds and college educated elites, suddenly it doesn't seem so crazy...
Now realize that they are literally getting people to PAY to do this. And the volume of people trying to use 4chan was getting so high as to be un-moderateable, hence the sudden need for email verification, and 900 second waiting period. If they didn't have a purpose, they wouldn't care, they'd just let people spam the board into being unusable.
I think that entire website is used to generate messaging without it appearing fed-baked, after all, why hire an out of touch propagandist to make propaganda that will be outdated in a day, when you have a legion of insane people foaming at the mouth trying to spread their ideas as quickly as possible. Just control the messages that propagate, and you can control a massive engine of internet culture.
anyway THIIIIIIIIINK ABOOOOOOOOOOOUT IT!