On the night of December 27, a bot went apeshit on 4chan, posting so much shit it seemed hard to find a legit thread. Almost all of these threads/images/premises/copypasta had been seen for months but never in such volume. Someone started a thread calling it out.

Several people linked to multiple identical threads occurring across all boards simultaneously. Posts were happening too fast for it to be a single person without a bot net and automated software.



By December 29 as many as 70 suspected bot threads had been discovered in various 4chan archives (more on this later.) On /pol/ that evening many claimed that it was likely the work of trolls, shitposters, and “samefags” (users who converse with themselves to bump and/or generate interest in the thread) and the posts were likely not to be connect to each other.



By December 30, it has been confirmed that at least 33 threads were posted by the same bot in one day.



Please look at this matrix of the bot’s activity

These posts were spotted by the identical formatting of otherwise completely random file names such as:

faebb429-4137-4837-8137-6252cd42b.png

1b372a58-71f8-4902-810e-8cd385aa3.png

Please note that these are not random threads with similar filenames. They all contain identical text (on several topics) and all use identical images (per topic)

Most of the images were nearly identical, but slightly modified change the file hash value. I used an image diffing program to see if any pixels changed, but none were visibly modified. The image files don’t appear to contain malware or hidden messages.

All file names were random alphanumeric formatted as follows:

########-####-####-####-#########.filetype

These were obviously posted in an automated (or semi-automated) fashion.