/pol/ was first added to 4chan on 10 November 2011. It replaced the /new/ board for news which was deleted on 17 January 2011. According to 4chan's creator and ex-administrator
Christopher Poole, this was because it had "devolved into /
stormfront/". This was comparing /new/ to Stormfront, which is the oldest and largest
Holocaust-denialist white supremacist site. According to Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, /pol/ was created by Poole "to siphon off and contain the overtly
xenophobic and racist comments and memes from other wings of 4chan." This has led to /pol/ acquiring the nickname of a "
containment board", because its purpose is to keep
far-right and generally political content off of 4chan's other boards. The board quickly attracted posters with a political persuasion that later would be described with a new term, the
alt-right.
Notable events Screenshots of
Trayvon Martin's hacked social media accounts were initially posted to /pol/ in 2015. After the
2015 Umpqua Community College shooting, /pol/ began attempting to circulate on social media claims that comedian
Sam Hyde was the perpetrator of a mass shooting event or terrorist attack. They repeated this after several other mass shootings, in attempts to troll mainstream news outlets into
reporting Hyde as the attacker. According to
BBC News,
CNN mistakenly included Hyde's image on their coverage of the Umpqua shooting. After the
2017 Las Vegas shooting, a Google search for a different man's name returned a /pol/ thread in the "top stories" section falsely identifying him as the shooter. A spokesperson for Google said that the thread had appeared because search queries and news about the man were rare, allowing for the thread to appear in results, but that the thread did not appear in broader searches about the Las Vegas shooting. On April 6, 2016, users on the board's /sg/ (short for
Syria General) thread collaborated with a Russian Twitter account to locate an encampment of
Syrian rebels. The account then claimed to have forwarded the location to the
Russian Ministry of Defense. In summer 2016, /pol/ users coordinated "Operation Google", a campaign to associate the name "Google" with the ethnic slur "
nigger". This was undertaken in response to Google's
Jigsaw subsidiary developing Conversation AI, a tool made to recognize offensive language. One of the most popular memes found on the board during the period surrounding the 2016 US presidential election was
Pepe the Frog, which has been deemed a hate symbol in some contexts by the
Anti-Defamation League due to its use in uniforms, places, and people associated with
Nazism, the
Ku Klux Klan, and
antisemitism. Many /pol/ users favored
Donald Trump during
his 2016 United States presidential campaign. Upon his election, a /pol/ moderator embedded a pro-Trump video at the top of all of the board's pages. Users of /pol/ engaged in coordinated attacks on
LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner's
HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US, a 2017
performance art project made to protest
Donald Trump's first presidency. Some users on the board suggested committing acts of violence against participants in the art project. In 2017, users of /pol/ coordinated a campaign to convince mainstream news organizations that the
OK gesture was a white power symbol; the OK gesture was later used meta-ironically by white supremacists. In October 2017, a tripcode user referred to as "Q" began posting on 4chan's /pol/ board in what would become the
QAnon conspiracy theory and political movement. Q soon moved to 8chan. In 2019, 4chan and 8chan were temporarily blocked by internet service providers in Australia and New Zealand for containing videos of the
Christchurch mosque shootings. Before the shootings, the shooter posted on 8chan's /pol/ board. The suspected perpetrators of the
Poway synagogue shooting and the
El Paso shooting also allegedly posted their manifestos there. In 2019, 38 minutes before the news of
Jeffrey Epstein's
death was announced officially and in the media, an anonymous person made a post on /pol/, claiming that Epstein had died "an hour ago". Later,
FDNY launched an investigation due to the breach and violation of a federal health
privacy law,
HIPAA. In late February and early March 2021, users on /pol/ boosted a social media trend called "
super straight", which they said was a new sexuality describing heterosexuals who would never have a sexual relationship with
transgender people. The trend began with a later-deleted
TikTok video by a user who said he had created the term because he was tired of being called
transphobic.
The Daily Dot stated that "trolls, bigots, and
trans-exclusionary radical feminists" were "reframing their harassment of transgender people" through this trend. The trend spread to other platforms as well, including
Twitter, and
4chan users were eager to "
red pill" those in the
Generation Z age group, create division among LGBTQ communities, and use the language of LGBTQ rights to troll leftists. Some 4chan members used Nazi symbols in their symbolism, including the logo of
Adolf Hitler's
Schutzstaffel, which also used SS as an acronym. Colors associated with "super straight", often used in the form of
flags, were black and orange. The day after the
2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, Representative
Paul Gosar (R-AZ) falsely claimed that its perpetrator was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien" in a tweet, which was taken down two hours after it was posted. The claim was based on a rumor started by an anonymous poster on /pol/, who posted the
Reddit account of a transgender woman and claimed that she was the shooter; photos of the woman were widely shared on social media, including in conservative Facebook groups, where she was also erroneously identified as the shooter and harassed. ==Reception==