4chan Quietly Pulled ‘Adult Requests’ Last Month. There’s Still No Sign It’s Coming Back.
A fast-growing hub for AI-generated nonconsensual imagery shut down after Open Measures research drove wider scrutiny of the abuse it facilitated
4chan’s “Adult Requests” imageboard was one of the internet’s largest and fastest-growing venues for the nonconsensual trading and solicitation of sexually explicit images generated with AI tools — commonly known as “deepfakes.”
Then, on May 21, 4chan abruptly shut Adult Requests down. At the time of writing, the imageboard has been removed from the site’s index, and its URL returns an error page reading: “File not found.”
We’ve seen Adult Requests go dark before, only to return within days. But this time feels different: more than a month has now passed with no apparent sign it’s coming back.
The closure appears to have largely gone unnoticed by users on 4chan’s other boards, though a handful have voiced confusion over its disappearance and the absence of any explanation.
Earlier this year, Open Measures published an investigation into Adult Requests that exposed the scale and intensity of abuse occurring on the board. It sparked a broader wave of scrutiny — among researchers, policy analysts, and journalists — into its role in the wider ecosystem of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) online.
We’re glad our report helped drive a broader reckoning with this corner of the internet, and we’ll keep watching for where its former inhabitants migrate next.
