Operation Pridefall

Overview

Operation Pridefall is a supposed raid organized by 4chan users to try and spread anti-LGBTQ messages on social media and harass brands that support the LGBTQ community during June, which is also Pride Month, of 2020. As of May 29th, 2020, it is unclear if the raid is a sincere campaign or a means of trolling.

Background

On May 10th, 2020, an anonymous 4chan user posted a thread in /int/ outlining "Operation Pridefall,"^[1] a campaign to damage the LGBTQ community during June of 2020. The plan centered around redpilling users in comments sections of companies which support the LGBTQ causes on social media. The anon wrote:

every June, hundreds of massive corporations band together to smother social media with posts in favor of "Pride Month", a code word for the degeneracy that is LGBT activism. Many of these accounts are rather small and get very little engagement, yet they continue to post without backlash.
Beginning on JUNE 1ST, The goal of Operation Pridefall is get on twitter, Instagram, etc. and drop a shitton of disturbing redpills on homosexuality on the comments of the lesser known pages.
The bigger pages are ok targets, but posts tend to get unnoticed in the sea of other comments. Commenting on smaller pages (~100 likes or so) means anyone who views it will see the posts, and companies will reconsider their posts afterwards

The thread also instructed users to get a fake phone number and get burner social media accounts to comment on these social media pages.

Developments

The operation began spreading outside of 4chan two weeks later, when on May 24th, 2020, Twitter user @koshersemite^[2] posted tweets with screenshots of the original post and other threads talking about putting the operation into practice, gaining over 1,000 combined retweets and 2,200 combined likes (shown below).

The tweets led to the story getting picked up by PinkNews.^[3] Threads about the raid appeared in subreddits including /r/iamatotalpieceofshit,^[4] /r/outoftheloop^[5] and /r/gay.^[6] Several YouTubers made videos discussing the potential raids, including Ash_Is_Trash (shown below, left) and Alphabet Mafia (shown below, right).

While many outside of 4chan were concerned about the raid, others at the site were unsure if it was a legitimate raid people would attempt to put into effect or a troll or a false flag operation.

Search Interest

External References