Who owns 4chan?

Over the past 19 years, the imageboard 4chan has been tied to Gamergate, the inception of QAnon, the incubation of a particular brand of online racism, and a raft of domestic terror attacks that have killed scores of people.

Tragically, references and tributes to 4chan are littered throughout a 180-page screed believed to be written by the 18-year-old who is alleged to have shot 13 people in a predominately Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. All 10 victims killed in the massacre were Black. Just this week, 4chan’s users spread transphobic misinformation about the identity of the school shooter who killed 19 children and two adults in an elementary school in Uvdale, Texas, that quickly reached the feeds of a right-wing member of Congress.

Even as the imageboard continues to rise in infamy, a question lingers: Who actually owns 4chan?

For years, its ownership has been murky: Invented by an American, sold to a Japanese businessman in 2015, its corporate structure is largely unknown, beyond a pair of Delaware-registered corporations.

New information, shared exclusively with WIRED, provides greater detail into 4chan’s largely unpublicized relationship with a major Japanese toy firm called the Good Smile Company. Legal documents, corporate records, and interviews with those familiar with both companies show that Good Smile played a role in 4chan’s 2015 acquisition.

In addition to being 4chan’s silent partner, Good Smile has struck major deals with some of the world’s largest entertainment companies, including Disney and Warner Bros. Good Smile also produces figurines depicting underage anime girls in various states of undress.

The company said last year that it is just a passive investor in 4chan. Records of a nondisclosure agreement, however, reveal that Good Smile Company and a major Japanese telecommunications company were involved in the 2015 acquisition of 4chan by its current owner. Court records, first detailed by The Hollywood Reporter and Kotaku in September and reviewed by WIRED, allege that Good Smile employees were disturbed by their company’s engagement with 4chan, but executives ignored their concerns.

As the United States grapples with 4chan’s toxic influence, from its role in enabling the January 6 insurrection to its alleged influence on mass shooters, its clear that attempts to hold someone accountable and perhaps even reduce its role in radicalizing young men will not be possible without a better grasp of its corporate structure.

From his dorm room in Arkansas in 1999, Hiroyuki Nishimura created 2channel.

The Japanese-language imageboard is built on several successful text-based usenet and message boards. But Nishimura offered users something rare and exciting: the freedom to be completely anonymous.

“It’s where idiots can be the idiots they want to be. It’s where they are allowed to say things they don’t need to take responsibility for,” Nishimura would tell The Japan Times years later. That freedom would prove wildly popular in Japan. Within a decade, Nishimura became the bad boy of Japanese media, cultivating a career as a self-help guru and even inking a deal with Japanese telecommunications giant Dwango to set up the hugely successful video-sharing site Niconico. Nishimura was the celebrity face of Niconico until he left in 2013.

While the message boards were largely inscrutable to English-speaking audiences, they had a small cult following stateside. On the Something Awful message boards, where a particularly edgy brand of Internet humor was taking shape, a group of users became enthralled with the anime popular on 2channel (and its offshoot, 2chan). They shared their finds on Something Awful’s Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse forum.

Amongst those early devotees was Christopher Poole. In 2003, looking to replicate 2channel’s vibe, he grabbed the open source code underpinning the website, translated it, and officially opened 4chan. He called himself moot.

In the early days, 4chan users could share anime on /a/, and everything else on /b/, the random board. The website quickly grew, branching into all manner of Internet culture, hardcore pornography, news, and, eventually, the politics board, /pol/.

Over its first decade of life, 4chan defined and shaped troll culture. There was a mischievous streak: Its users harassed white supremacist radio host Hal Turner and hacked Sarah Palin’s email. But 4chan also had a persistent problem with child sexual abuse material, while its users used their anonymity to make threats against their schools. (At the same time, 4chan users reported their fellow users who, they feared, could commit acts of violence.)

In 2014, a more coherent, and conservative, ideology started to take hold on 4chan: The Gamergate harassment campaign against game journalists and women game developers began to define the channel—/b/ and /pol/, in particular—as more angry and reactionary than it had been previously.

In early 2015, just as 4chan was wrestling with its burgeoning toxic identity, Poole suddenly exited his 12-year-old creation.

“4chan has given me some amount of notoriety,” Poole told Rolling Stone at the time. “But it certainly hasn’t provided me with wealth.”

There was only one person who knew as much as, if not more than, Poole about running such an imageboard: Hiroyuki Nishimura.

Nishimura had lost 2channel a year earlier when it was seized by its registrar, Jim Watkins, who would go on to snap up 4chan’s even-less-moderated rival, 8chan(now 8kun). In September 2015, nine months after 4chan’s founder said he would be exiting the site, Poole announced that he was handing over the reins of one of the most popular sites on the Internet to Nishimura.

When Nishimura held an AMA on 4chan soon after his takeover became public, amid a torrent of racist comments, one user asked how he financed the sale. “I borrowed money,” Nishimura answered.

Frederick Brennan, the 8chan founder who later left the site and repudiated its toxic influence, says he was intrigued when Nishimura bought the site. “I was always suspicious that he could afford 4chan,” he says.

The month after Nishimura took over, Chris Harper-Mercer posted his intent to carry out an attack at a school in the northwest to 4chan’s incel board, /r9k/. Unlike previous threats, this one wasn’t idle: Harper-Mercer killed an assistant professor and eight students at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College before turning the gun on himself. It would be the first of several mass killings linked to 4chan and the incel ideology.

By 2016, Nishimura announced that the costs of running 4chan were simply too high and suggested the site’s closure was imminent. In 2018, Nishimura attempted to cleave the site in two—leaving 4chan intact, with its obscene and pornographic boards, but creating a safe-for-work alternative, attractive to advertisers, on 4channel. The separate domains continue to this day, but both sites rely on the same self-serve advertising platform. The not-safe-for-work 4chan domain seems mostly to show ads for porn, while 4channel features ads for Steam games, cryptocoins, and NFTs.

Website analytics firm Similarweb estimates that both 4chan and 4channel are still within the 1,000 most popular websites in the world.

When the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol sent a letter to 4chan last August, asking it to preserve documents that could shed light on the insurrection, the committee sent it to 4chan LLC and addressed it to Nishimura. Congressional investigators want to know what role, if any, 4chan played in the storming of the Capitol building.

Asked whether 4chan had even responded to the request, or whether Nishimura may be called to testify, the committee declined to comment.

4chan LLC is incorporated in Delaware but has registered businesses in New York, Virginia, and Ohio. 4chan Community Support LLC, the company listed as the owner on the 4chan website, is similarly incorporated in Delaware. According to documents filed with the state of New York and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, 4chan’s American headquarters is listed as Los Angeles. Both limited liability companies report their address as a post office box in central Los Angeles.

Nishimura has said he is based in Paris, though in 2019 he mused to BuzzFeed News about obtaining a Latvian visa.

4chan does not appear to have an independent physical office in the United States, nor any staff. But there is another Japanese company, with offices in Los Angeles, which could explain a lot about the image board’s murky ownership and operations.

The Good Smile Company is a massively popular toy and hobby company—its brand of plastic figures, called Nendoroids, have attracted licensing deals from Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros., and a host of other American and Japanese companies. (Neither Disney, Marvel, nor Warner Bros. responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.)

In 2018, Good Smile released a Nendoroid of Yotsuba Koiwai, a popular anime character who also happens to be 4chan’s unofficial mascot. On Instagram, fans picked up on the connection “4chan represent!” one wrote. “Congratulations 4chan!” wrote another.