4chan is ephemeral (its posts are routinely deleted) and supposedly anonymous (the default name that appears in the name settings of anyone posting is simply “Anonymous”). However, the website inserts a unique string of letters and numbers that sticks to each person in any given thread, as a way to keep track of who’s who in a conversation while still maintaining the appearance of anonymity.
This meant that, using the archive site 4chan 4plebs.orgI was able to follow other comments from @thereal_JacobK in the thread, which revealed previously unknown details about his life, including his frustration with living in Germany, his desire to move to the US, and his love for the Second Amendment. But perhaps most surprisingly, he described himself as a incel—the term used by the online misogynist community that defines itself as “involuntary celibates.”
Revealing the personality behind the gun
Also revealing was the way Jacob D wrote, anonymously, in that 4chan thread. He only capitalized the word “I” at the beginning of a sentence, never after. And he always inserted a space before an exclamation or question mark, which is not typical among Germans.
Analyzing these writing habits is the domain of forensic linguisticswhich was made famous by its use in the arrest of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. These stylistic features allowed me to follow more of his comments in other conversation threads, and his repeated use of the same images sometimes gave me an additional clue as to the threads he had been on.
Eventually, I discovered threads where Jacob D had uploaded photos of himself, including one where he showed his face. In part by using a facial recognition platform, I was able to discover his former Cloud of sound and Couchsurfing profiles; in the latter, he said he planned to travel to the United States, “the country that fascinated me since my adolescence,” before joining the German army.
And on both profiles, he revealed his real name: Jakob Duygu.
I was finally able to Tracking hundreds of supposedly anonymous posts that Duygu posted on 4chan and other message boards over the years. The FGC-9 designer wrote about his life in Germany, his time in the Bundeswehr (German armed forces), and his loneliness and despair as an incel. They show him as a complex, volatile, obsessive, and tragic person. And they also reveal some extremist ideas.
The difference between these comments and those he made publicly in interviews (using his pseudonym JStark1809) was striking. In interviews, he spoke about the need to protect freedom of speech and human rights. He invoked the example of the genocide of European Jews in the Holocaust or the Uighur people in China as arguments to justify the need to have firearms and why he created the FGC-9.
But when you look at his anonymous comments, a different picture emerges. Far from being a person concerned about human rights, his words were often xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic. And this was not unique to 4chan, which has a particularly offensive and unpleasant culture where perhaps not everything should be taken at face value.
