Uh oh, now the 4chan party van is coming (feds coming to take you away)
... pedobear as a meme does actually significantly predate /pol/.
However...
A thing that a lot of people don't seem to know is that 4chan exists because m00t / Chris Poole got banned from Something Awful for posting way way way too much hentai, including loli.
4chan exists primarily because m00t grabbed a number of his hentai/loli loving friends from SA, and made his own forum/board, with black jack and hookers.
Pedobear previously existed as a meme on 2chan, the Japanese board that m00t seems to... have basically ripped or copied or otherwise acquired the source code of, to then modify a bit and make 4chan.
https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/pedobear
If my memory serves me correctly, I stopped using 4chan entirely when in 2008... and I swear that this happened but I don't have any proof...
... m00t basically put up a sort of admin message for around 12 or 24 hours saying that as a result of significant media attention that had been garnered by some combination of 4chan's latest online / real world stunts...
... well, he was now directly cooperating with the FBI and had essentially set up a direct moderator account for them.
That message was then removed.
So... yeah, by my recollection, 4chan has actually been an FBI honeypot since 2008.
And I would also make a reasonable guess that they do this (amongst many other reasons) so that they can build up the archive of CSAM that they curate and maintain, that they then use in a kind of content ID like system to track the spread and proliferation of CSAM, to be able to easily identify it on a seized computer.
... I guess also a lot of people probably don't know the FBI does that.
TIL
I updated my comment with a lot more info.
For the record, I was a stupid kid who primarily wanted to talk about video games ... I noped the fuck out pretty hard after I realized how truly deranged most of the people/content on 4chan was.
... and obviously after the uh, FBI cooperation message.
Sorry to double post but this is potentially relevant:
So, yeah, the FBI maintains a large database of CSAM, for their... CSAM content ID style system.
People who know that that exists have occasionally pointed out that... that is kind of weird, lets just put it that way.
Well, I've just had a horrifying realization.
We currently have AI/LLM corpos on the record going to places like AnnasArchive to acquire their vast troves of data to use in training an LLM.
... If somebody hooks up this FBI CSAM database... into an LLM... well, you now basically have a machine that produces CSAM, and likely also gore/torture videos.
... hooray ...
Like uh, Pete Hegseth just ... you know, hooked up Grok/XAI into... apparently I guess all of the US's military systems.
The scenario I am describing is unfortunately plausible.
Good news, that's not how the CSAM database works. What happens is the image is hashed (for non technical people, hashing is a way of always generating the same "ID" from the file data) and the image is discarded. Now the article I found to verify my claim also talks about how the FBI used to distribute CSAM to catch people, so they have some probably... But not a database wide amount.
You may have missed how there's a massive CSAM problem with AI because the models are all trained on CSAM. "Plausible" is a bit behind the times.
Määbe Ämerikkka Grääbe Ägäain :DDDDDD
To Catch a Predator 2: The Big Leagues
Epstein was on 4chan.
That's his fursuit.
Didn't expect to ever see this thing again. Search engines literally reroute you to child protection services if you look for it.
oh...thought pic represented xi (commie dictator of China)
Taiwan is an awesome country btw!
You're thinking of this meme.
Both are bears, so I can see the confusion you had.
"Impossible" - Thanos
Me?
Is that Danganronpa?
Sure is lil buddy 👍
Yeah the art style is familiar
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