[outinyellowdogcountry]

PJ, what do you think that means? All of them purged I mean.

[Political Junkie Too]

I don't know much about 4chan; I only first heard about them due to this controversy.

I think we can all speculate on the various reasons for this, ranging from the benign to the ominous:

1. The site that hosted the graphics closed down.
2. The owner of the account that hosted the graphics closed the account, and the graphics were purged.
3. The owner of the account realized that the "prank" got out of control and deleted his comments.
4. If the graphics were hosted on 4chan directly, then the owner of the anonymous account purged the graphics to cover his tracks once the topic got too hot.
5. The owner of the 4chan account was discovered via IP address tracing, and was made an offer he couldn't refuse to remove the content.
6. The content was removed externally by unknown means.

4chan was founded as an anonymous site for people to share images. I've heard that people also share "fan fiction" over there, where "fiction" (in "scare quotes") is really counter-culture distorted fantasies. It could be true that people were anonymously making up obscene stories about world leaders, just to see who can top whom in thinking up the most outrageous things. It could be true that someone doing candidate opposition research stumbled across this.

It could be true that someone saw this, thought it was real, and started circulating rumors.

It could be true that someone saw this, knew it for what it was, and leveraged it into "foreign intel" for nefarious purposes, putting a plan in place relied on parts of this as "internet corroboration."

It could be true that once the Buzz Feed story exposing this to the general population was out there, the original sources on 4chan were no longer needed.

-PJ