Extremist sounding boards: Forums such as 4chan play role in promoting violence against the electric sector

Earlier this year, media reported that the imageboard platform 4chan had been hacked, leading to identifying details about its moderators being made public. Much of the reporting also focused on 4chan’s controversial nature, including the prevalence of offensive or hateful speech and links to mass shootings with attackers sometimes posting to the site to claim responsibility for their violent crimes. While the irreverent content and light moderation found on image boards such as 4chan and derivatives like 8chan have long been a source of notoriety, it is worth evaluating how they serve as fertile ground for users to share violent content targeting critical infrastructure sectors, such as the electric sector. 

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) – a critical infrastructure protection organization focused on enhancing the security of the North American electric industry – has observed threatening chatter made on image boards against the electric sector over the years. The E-ISAC has identified threat actors often using these boards to spread information about their ideological beliefs, tactical guidance and target ideas for violent action, thus playing a role in online radicalization. This includes hundreds of E-ISAC-tracked posts and comments made on 4chan and similar sites promoting sabotage of the electric grid. 

It is important to note that the aforementioned threats are very uncommon on most 4chan boards, and even when they do occur they are not met with universal praise or agreement. 4chan was founded in 2003 by an American, Christopher Poole. The image board is made up of several different boards where users can discuss a variety of topics, including /o/ (Auto), /adv/ (Advice), /trv/ (Travel) and /sp/ (Sports). Certain boards, however, most notably /pol/ (Politically Incorrect), can be hotbeds for violent content and rhetoric.

Malicious memes

Most of the threats against the electric sector tracked by the E-ISAC fall into two categories: promoting anti-grid sentiment and sharing target and tactical guidance. Some posts and comments promoted anti-grid sentiment in a more benign, though still potentially threatening, manner, including through the use of humor and memes. On certain parts of 4chan, electrical infrastructure, namely substations, has become part of the wider meme culture, with both violent and nonviolent memes and jokes being shared about substations since they symbolically represent the wider electric sector. Examples include the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create memes involving anime characters destroying substations as well as more subtle memes depicting anime characters merely standing in front of substations – a wink and a nod to those who are “in” on the “joke.” 

The E-ISAC has also observed 4chan users manipulating images of news stories detailing animal-caused power outages to show appreciation for the given animal that caused a power outage, though those incidents were not acts of sabotage. This use of humor and memes to promote both violent and nonviolent content has proven a successful mechanism for extremists, allowing for certain sentiments or beliefs to be transferred into a more digestible format. 4chan has a strong meme culture overall and is known for its influence on meme generation and virality. With electrical infrastructure becoming a fixture of this meme culture and wider use of humor on the platform, that infrastructure is being highlighted in an online environment where violent and extreme rhetoric readily exists. Therefore, it is possible that even nonviolent memes and humorous content about the electric grid can promote anti-grid sentiment and influence violent discourse about the sector. Generalized rhetoric, often consisting of nonviolent memes or chatter not quite considered threats, accounted for over half of all 4chan content observed by the E-ISAC in 2024. Much of this content did not mention specific electric sector assets and instead often referred to the “power grid” or other generic targets. 

Tactics and targets

Other threats are more specific in terms of their targets and tactics; one 4chan user advocated for cutting power lines, fiber-optic cables and municipal water and sewage lines as well as knocking down phone towers. Sometimes the motivation for these types of threats revolves around cutting off power to subjects of the users’ ire, such as when one user advocated for cutting power lines supplying Washington, D.C., in the event of a hypothetical draft for military service. Other users encourage mass attacks against electric sector assets out of hope that such actions would collapse the current socio-political order, thus leading to a state of anarchy, mass violence or chaos and the potential for those sharing their ideology to come into power in its wake. As an example, one user said they could cause plenty of chaos all by themselves, including by blowing up electric substations or shooting out the wheels of 18-wheeler trucks. This promotion of actions to intensify chaos and conflict to collapse current societal systems and achieve a new political system/power structure is known as “accelerationism.” It has become a hallmark of domestic violent extremist (DVE) groups in recent years, as West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) notes, with many DVEs regarding the electric sector as the backbone of our society and thus considering its destruction a viable solution to their perceived grievances. 

In tracked posts and comments where image board users mentioned specific types of electric sector assets, electrical substations were the most commonly mentioned target, followed by others such as transmission, distribution and generation infrastructure. Ballistic damage was the most mentioned tactic in these threats, with most of these threats not specifying a weapon, followed by acts of vandalism such as cutting wires, felling power poles/pylons and arson. The E-ISAC has observed multiple occurrences of 4chan users mentioning sabotaging electric infrastructure in relation to specific electric utilities in North America. In some cases, image board users have also shared links to publicly available maps depicting the locations of critical infrastructure sites, including power generation facilities, transmission and distribution networks, substations and power lines. 

Old threats, new methods

Some users discussed the use of developing technologies, such as drones, 3D-printed firearms and AI, to assist with attacks or plans to attack the electric grid. In one example, a 4chan user advocated for 3D printing guns, making explosives, destroying the electric grid, carrying out firebombing attacks and using .308-caliber rifles to shoot government officials at public events. Observed image board users also appear to be drawing inspiration from the development of drone warfare seen on display in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the recent Israel-Iran conflict. In one 4chan thread, a user asked others what Russia could or should do to the U.S. with sleeper agents to create chaos. Others responded that the Metcalf substation attack was a good example of an effective terrorist attack that would work, referencing the 2013 sniper attack on the Metcalf transmission substation in Coyote, Calif. Another user begged to differ, instead advocating that people fly a drone over a substation with conductive wire attached to it so that it shorts out power lines upon contact. 

Additionally, 4chan has served as a platform where users have promoted and shared extremist documents that highlight very specific tactics for attacking electric infrastructure. This includes the sharing of images from and archive links to extremist publications originally disseminated on Telegram, such as “Make It Count: A Guide for the 21st Century Accelerationist” and “The Hard Reset”. These documents were originally created and distributed by the “Terrorgram” collective, a loosely organized network of Telegram users and channels, which often promoted white supremacist racially/ethnically motivated violent extremist (RMVE) content, and included participants from groups such as the Atomwaffen Division, The Base and later groups like the National Socialist Order (NSO). Dozens of pages in these documents are dedicated to attacking critical infrastructure, with some showing detailed diagrams of electric sector assets such as transformers, mentioning where they are most vulnerable and how they should be destroyed. 4chan has also been used to proliferate original DVE content that did not originate on Telegram. Site users discussed explosives guidance and electric infrastructure in the comments of the posts where those documents were shared. 

The future landscape

Many researchers have voiced concern about the minimal amount of content moderation undertaken by 4chan in regard to this type of violent content. 4chan utilizes a network of “janitors” to carry out content moderation. These janitors are assigned to certain boards on the platform and can remove threats, replies and images on their boards, among other duties, but are unable to ban users. In addition to the janitors, 4chan also has 17 “Global Rules” by which users must abide. Rule 1 is that users “will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law.” According to a report by WIREDin 2023, legal filings have shown that 4chan hands out between 5,000 and 7,000 bans per day; bans are issued by post, not by user. Of these bans, WIRED reported that 60% were issued due to posts being off topic for their given board. As other major social media platforms have developed content moderation protocols over the years to combat the sharing of extremist content on their platforms, 4chan has done remarkably little in comparison.

Hand in hand with this concern is the fact that 4chan has been patronized by extremists who went on to commit acts of mass violence. Payton Gendron, the individual who killed 10 people in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in a racially motivated attack, cited 4chan as a key part of his radicalization journey. In Gendron’s manifesto, he stated that 4chan introduced to him the belief that the White race is dying out. After seeing a .gif of New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant’s attack while on the “Politically Incorrect” (/pol/) board, Gendron stated he believed he could do something about this perceived threat to the White race. Gendron’s livestreamed attack was eventually shared on 4chan before he was arrested for the crime. 

The anonymous nature of posting for image boards likely makes them attractive to DVEs seeking to promote their ideology and encourage others to carry out attacks. DVEs of various ideologies have displayed interest in sabotaging the electric infrastructure in the United States, perceiving the electric sector as a vital artery of our current society with which they have grievances. As poor content moderation practices continue to exist in these corners of the internet, the E-ISAC anticipates that threats to critical infrastructure, especially the electric sector, will continue to proliferate on image boards such as 4chan. 

Editor’s note: Out of security considerations, Threat Beat is not publishing the names of the E-ISAC researchers who wrote this article.