You can check on 4plebs. I don't read 4chan, but the same is true of 8chan and far-right Telegram - extremist doomers tend to be good early warning system for incidents that seem to bear out their apocalyptic worldview.

Maybe so, but I absolutely don't believe that anybody on 4chan was discussing covid prior to December 29. People can pretend it gets the "scoop" all they want in their little fantasy world, just want to call out the veracity of those claims when I see them.

It seems they first took up discussing it on January 2, (based on a CBS news report) which is reasonably quick off the mark. The main difference between imageboards and other media is their willingness to take up a topic seriously before it arrives in the mainstream, for good or (more often) ill.

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/238064455/#238064455

Yes, those comments are definitely indicative of them taking it seriously.

Pretty quick, I'll give them that, but not before coverage - this is only a week or so before I became aware of the virus. Granted, I was traveling in China at the time, but it was known.

I only mean seriously in the sense of giving their attention to it, in somewhat the same way as sewer sampling can be a useful way to detect emerging COVID clusters. Online extremists glom onto anything involving political instability because it's a potential opportunity. I noticed the same thing with the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

There is also this October 2019 thread [0] which mentions a coronavirus-like bioweapon, which, like the "High Incident Project" thread [1] (covered by snopes here [2]) is often pointed to by conspiracy theorists as examples of insiders leaking information on 4chan before events of global significance.

In my analysis I find these are examples of fitting events to predictions after the fact; the huge number of 'larp' threads on conspiracy forums allows for cherry-picking examples where some content later rhymed with reality.

[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/#q230593401

[1] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141096258/#141102703

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/4chan-user-prediction-las-...

That 4chan thread is talking about the October 2019 report from

https://www.ghsindex.org/

sponsored in part by the Gates Foundation and reported by the Washington Post and others, retweeted by Joe Biden.

This was not secret insider information.

The closest I could find in online archives to a December 2019 pandemic discussion on 4chan was this single (terribly racist and cruel) comment from December 30th[0], "Don't worry. The worlds going to suffer a global pandemic soon (very, very, soon) which will wipe out poor urban populations..."

[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/237746333/#q237746818 (Warning, this link contains graphic hate speech like much of 4chan does and is not suitable for human consumption.)

As expected.