As someone else pointed out, 4chan has always been pedophilic. When I first started browsing there maybe 20 or so years ago, as a teenager, I remembered being disturbed by all the pedo bear seal of approval stuff and often saw threads on /b/ talking about how pedophilia can be romantic. The most creepy one I saw was a comic with an old man talking about how much he loves this girl, and he knows people won't understand, and then he hands flowers to a little girl. They also kept posting links to some site run by a convicted pedo using a loophole with receiving fan mail for the site to encourage kids to contact him. The whole site was him justifying pedo "relationships." They'd also spam links to that one Swedish pedophile's CP trading forum. (Sisopp or whatever? Anyone know what happened to that guy? Last I remember he was sealed inside his apartment and people kept leaving notes on his door saying he was a pedophile and Swedish police just ignored it.) That's all without even mentioning the lolicon spam. Even now, I see threads screaming and crying about "roasties" trying to take away their child sex robots.
Taking a stab at it, I'd say they're probably jealous trannies were enough of a protected class to get away with actually talking to kids on Discord for a while. I genuinely believe a lot of the pedo 4chan posters of old trooned out to also go talk to kids. A personal anecdote, I knew a guy that was a big /b/ poster and defended lolicon as very necessary for free speech. After the tranny shit kicked off, he trooned out. He had a friend that was a confirmed pedo and only stopped being friends with him a while later because he was "transphobic." His first and immediate obsession was saving (going out of his way to talk to) "trans kids." He works at Google now. I feel like this is probably a very common trajectory.
