Argentina's 4chan shuts down amid suspicions that Cristina Fernandez's attacker was a user

Last Thursday, Fernando Sabag Andre Montiel allegedly attempted to assassinate Argentina's vice president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The gun did not fire, Fernandez was taken to safety, and Montiel was arrested. When images of Montiel began circulating publicly, users of an Argentine online forum claimed to recognize him as a user and immediately tried to distance themselves from the would-be assassin.

The forum, Rouzed, was an Argentine digital community where anonymous posts about mundane topics like hair care and humor memes mixed with conversation threads filled with racist comments or memes, sexual harassment, and even discrimination against people with Down syndrome. The site's operators took the forum offline shortly after the attack on the vice president, after several users accused each other of complicity in the assassination attempt and talked about "hiding evidence" linking Rouzed to Montiel. The administrators shut the site down when comments like "the shooter was a rouzero" began to appear.

By Saturday, September 3, the creators of the space opened a new forum called "Boxed." That same day, an anonymously managed Telegram account introduced the community to a new site, claiming in the group chat "[Rouzed in exile]" that Boxed was the heir to Rouzed. "The idea is to bring everyone together in the same place. [I'm not going to let 'the R' die]," said the administrator of that chat. Rest of World attempted to contact Boxed's administrators through the email published on the site to ask why Rouzed had closed and whether the new site would address the hate speech issues, but received no response at the time of publication.

Rouzed's anonymous, public, and unmoderated structure created a "breeding ground for radicalization," Niv Sardi, an activist and open-source developer who has extensively studied social media and political violence, told Rest of World. "It's common to think that 'those people' [extremists] exist in dark, exclusive, inaccessible places, but in truth, their ideas can be found anywhere. The fact that extremism is a cult doesn't mean it's closed to the public. The danger is precisely that it's very easy to find."

Rouzed's use as a hub for extremists makes it part of a global trend of anonymous, public, and relatively unmoderated chat sites. One of the most famous, 4chan, also has a troubled history of mixing mundane content with hate speech. Recently, a shooter in Buffalo, New York, was allegedly identified as a frequent poster on the site.

Before Rouzed's moderators shut down the forum, commenters recirculated posts attributed to Montiel, including alleged images of himself with Nazi tattoos on his arms, which, they indicated, allowed them to recognize him as Fernandez's attacker.

"In case of an investigation by any federal entity or similar, I have no relationship with this group or the people in it, I don't know how I'm here, probably added by a third party, I do not support any actions by the members of this group," said a user on the Rouzed forum, posting the message in Spanish, English, French, Japanese, and Portuguese.

Sardi, who has studied sites like 4chan, noted that the fact that Rouzed was an easily accessible site with no functional moderation also led to its downfall. The breadth of topics on the site made its community much more "diverse," he said, than one would expect from an atomized far-right nucleus. Montiel's alleged posts indicate an ideology on the margins of the site, and when other users found themselves participating in the same forum as the would-be shooter, many feared being identified with those ideas as well.

However, just as there were users who didn't share Montiel's ideology, many others probably feared having "lost their hangout because of a normie," as one user commented on Boxed.

Regarding the continuation of Rouzed as Boxed, Ezequiel Ipar, a CONICET researcher and professor of sociological theory at the University of Buenos Aires, explained to Rest of World that the underlying problem was not an individual, like Montiel, or a website, like Rouzed, but rather a systemic problem. One in which digital spaces like Boxed make hate speech accessible in a "cheap, fast, and simple" way. To truly confront extremism, Ipar advocated for "online education, so that when people encounter a hate message, they don't simply remain shocked by its violence, but are empowered to reclaim those platforms."

This article was originally published on Rest of World on September 7, 2022.