Users of an alt-right 4chan board are conspiring a cyberattack against the LGBT+ community. (4chan)
Alt-right 4chan users are plotting to hijack LGBT+ Pride month on June 1 by clogging social media with poisonous homophobia and boycotting supportive brands.
Members of the imageboard website plotted “Operation Pridefall” as early May 10 on the /pol/ board, according to an archived version of the thread.
The /pol/ board has emerged in recent years as a hub of online alt-right content and immediately became clogged with threads strategising the alarming cyberattack.
Organisers explained their plan to create a swarm of artificial accounts to relentlessly share anti-LGBT+ content across social media, pointedly targeting brands’ digital Pride campaigns.
They urged members to make the campaign “normie friendly” and opt not to create content relating to “Nazi/Hitler s**t”. Some supplied downloadable packs of anti-LGBT+ memes for users to disseminate.
here’s some more information about what they plan on doing and just how horrible they are, from their own discord servers and forums. #OperationPridefall pic.twitter.com/DHP31i3Qnx
— samantha✡️🏳️🌈🏴🚩 (@koshersemite) May 25, 2020
Alt-right 4chan users plot to launch volley of cyberattacks against LGBT+ community.
Targeted companies include Starbucks, Amazon, Coca Cola, several British and American media outlets, local law enforcement departments as well as 4chan itself, according to users, as well as an “Image and OP Image Archive” for the campaign seen by PinkNews.
The pack primarily consisted of fake or heavily sensational news clippings, photographs of drag queen storytime events, photographs of gender affirmation surgeries as well as materials which appear to link gay people with paedophilia – a falsehood alt-right trolls have shared in the past.
Moreover, a promotional video for the project, created by one member, featured Pepe the Frog – a meme-turned mascot for certain alt-right circles – aiming a long-range rifle at a drag queen.
“It’s quite simple,” one anonymous organiser of “Operation Pridefall” wrote.
“Every June, hundreds of massive corporations band together to smother social media with posts in favour of ‘Pride Month’, a code word for the degeneracy that is LGBT+ activism.”
Organisers asked for 4chan users to set-up fake accounts using stopgap phone numbers and email accounts.
Other users workshopped tactics now that the “ch**k flu has disrupted the “degeneracy parades, so now that all of the degenerates are stuck indoors, what can we do to rain even more on their cancelled parade?”
Methods ranged from co-opting the six-stripe rainbow flag to promote racial and ethnic segregation in an effort to have the rainbow labelled a hate symbol, posting “anti-faggotry, suicide statistics and anti-tranny memes” and even crowdfunding to run anti-LGBT+ billboards.
Discussions on Discord, a real-time chat platform, saw users cabal to repurpose TikTok videos with anti-LGBT+ captions alongside setting-up fake dating app profiles, screenshots of Discord servers show.