4chan is ephemeral (posts are routinely culled) and supposedly nameless (the default title setting for anybody posting is solely “Nameless”). Nonetheless, the web site inserts a singular string of letters and numbers that follow every particular person in anyone thread—as a method of retaining monitor of who’s who in a dialog, whereas sustaining the veneer of anonymity.
This meant that, utilizing the 4chan archiving website 4plebs.org, I used to be in a position to monitor @thereal_JacobK’s different feedback within the thread, revealing hitherto unknown particulars about his life, together with his frustration with dwelling in Germany, his want to maneuver to the US, and his love for the Second Modification. However maybe most strikingly, he described himself as an incel—the time period utilized by the misogynistic on-line group who outline themselves as “involuntary celibates.”
Revealing the Character Behind the Gun
The way in which Jacob D wrote, anonymously, in that 4chan thread was additionally revealing. He solely capitalized the phrase “I” at first of a sentence—by no means after that. And he at all times inserted an area earlier than an exclamation or query mark, which isn’t typical for Germans.
Analyzing these writing habits is the area of forensic linguistics, made well-known for its use within the arrest of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. These stylistic options meant I may monitor extra of his feedback in different dialog threads—together with his repeat use of the identical photos typically giving an additional clue to threads he had been in.
Ultimately, I found threads during which Jacob D had uploaded pictures of himself, together with one the place he confirmed his face. Partially through the use of a facial recognition platform, I used to be then in a position to uncover his previous SoundCloud and Couchsurfing profiles—within the latter, he mentioned he deliberate to journey to the US, “the nation which fascinated me since my teenagers,” earlier than he joined the German navy.
And in each of those profiles, he revealed his actual title: Jakob Duygu.
Finally, I’ve been in a position to monitor a whole lot of supposedly nameless posts that Duygu posted on 4chan and different message boards through the years. The FGC-9’s designer wrote about his life in Germany, his time within the Bundeswehr (German armed forces), and his loneliness and despair at being an incel. They present him as a fancy, unstable, obsessive, and tragic particular person. And so they additionally reveal some extremist concepts.
The distinction between these feedback and people he made publicly in interviews (utilizing his JStark1809 pseudonym) was putting. In interviews, he spoke about the necessity to defend free speech and human rights. He invoked the instance of the genocide of European Jews within the Holocaust or the Uyghur individuals in China as arguments for why individuals have to have firearms, and why he created the FGC-9.
However whenever you take a look at his nameless feedback, a distinct image emerges. Removed from being an individual involved about human rights, his phrases have been typically xenophobic, racist, and antisemitic. And this wasn’t unique to 4chan, which has a very offensive, obnoxious tradition the place maybe not every little thing needs to be taken at face worth.
