TL;DR: No one on 4chan bothered to learn how to speak French.
On Sunday night, centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron defeated far-right populist Marine Le Pen in an election that morphed into the latest battleground for the wave of right-wing populism rippling through the US and Europe.
After the successes of both the UK's Brexit referendum and President Trump's campaign, many in the far-right corners of social media — on sites like 4chan and Reddit — expected and tried to help orchestrate a big win in France.
Here’s everything you need to know about how exactly the anonymous tribes of the right-wing internet failed to hijack the French electoral process. The main lesson here is once France's mainstream media decided to ignore the trolls, nothing they did managed to actually make it out, ironically, out of the far-right filter bubble.
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The closest equivalent to 4chan that exists in France is a website called jeuxvideo.com (JVC), which translates to "videogames.com."
It has a section of its forum called the "18-25" — and over the course of this election it's grown into a hotbed of both the far-right and the far-left in France. It has a few key differences to 4chan, though, the main ones being that it's not anonymous — there are usernames — and it's moderated.
Not unlike 4chan, however, JVC was also ground zero for the French wave of Gamergate.
JVC has been the number one stop this election cycle for every young French person flirting with far-right ideology. The name of the board, "18-25," refers to the age group of its users.
Around January, as the American far-right was adopting the Discord chat application, so were JVC users. A Discord server called "La Taverne des patriotes" quickly swelled in popularity after it was shared on JVC threads.
BuzzFeed News interviewed two of the moderators of "La Taverne des patriotes" — the tavern of patriots — in February. Users going by The French Resistance and Chepamec told us that they didn't identify as being "alt-right" at all.
BuzzFeed News was using Discord at this time under the username "Flavortown."
Discord