draft

https://archive.4plebs.org/x/search/text/amanda/start/2013-05-10/end/2013-05-14/

on May 11 2013, a 4chan user opened a thread on the x board for posting mysteries and oddities, inviting others to contribute. Accompanying the thread is a weird image. Another user asks where the image came from. The OP responds with a lurid story:

Leaked photos from a real fucked up personal blog, he/she had multiple pages uploaded before someone reported them for suspicious activity. The blogger would simply title each new photo Amanda1 or Amanda2. The author of the blog didn't type much personal stuff, and when they did it would be weird shit talking about Amanda (who I expect was the girl in the photo) He/she would say something like: "Went out today without my darling Amanda, I locked the doors so she should be safe." and one that really stood out which was like "I didn't give Amanda food this week, she looks much prettier this way." I think that's probably what got him/her reported, people probably felt uneasy and couldn't tell if this was just an art student trolling or a real fucked up person keeping a girl captive. I have a few more pages but they're mostly fetuses. It could've been a woman who had a ton of miscarriages or couldn't have a baby of her own so she was obsessed with others. Anyways, blog only stayed up for a few months. some person on /x/ posted the URL and it got popular fast,. didn't last long after that.

Man, what a story. But you can't believe anything you read on this website. So let's look a bit further.

Searching for "amanda" before this returns nothing (well nothing relevant- who the fuck is amanda byrnes and why are they obsessed with her?). this isn't necessarily -disproof, archives are missing lots of shit (the original Cicada3301 thread, for example...), and this one might not even go back far enough- the results from this search only go back to April 8th of the same year. One user in that original thread even bemoans the lack of an archive of the blog thread. Another poster recalls seeing the blog discussion threads but missing out on most of it due to a power outage.

"View same" for these images produces more interesting results. The second image has no other results; that plus the image itself not even being archived meaning the only copy we have of it is a blurry thumbnail. Cool, more lost media! But the OP image gives results, which give more images, which give more results.

One thread is a series of posts to a thread for spooky images, containing the op image plus three more; it gets no attention except for a request to "finish the set". -tripfag The second actually gets some discussion. After someone posts a random image from the set to a spooky image thread, someone asks what it is Another user finds and posts three of the four tripfag images including the OP image. (Where did they find this that they missed one of them?) -tripfag is in this thread but doesn't comment on the images -user reads the image text and finds description of fetal deformities, matching the images in the collage. -claims to have seen the images before in medical texts.

So, how does this stack up with the original claims? It's not looking good. No mention of blogs nor Amanda. -but the op claimed to have additional images with fetuses, which did exist. so it's possible the story was simply... embelished.

so it fake -the og post claims the images were called "amanda", but the images they themselves post are called "document", probably a generic default filename from some editor.

Trying to reverse image search any of the images just gives a useless result for "language", except for this one which comes out slightly more, uh, concerning-

-timestamp filenames

as now popularly discussed regarding the hunt for the original backrooms image (though usually poorly explained), each image posted to 4chan is paired with a string of numbers corresponding to the unix timestamp. Specifically, the image is displayed with its original filename next to the post, but the actual filename is the timestamp of its time of upload, and saving it from there will give it that filename. Thus the trajectory of an image across the site can somewhat be tracked.

other thread- may 12 2013, probably from tripfag's posts despite missing one of them. -the first image in the second found thread is jan 28 2013 all three times, so it's probably just the same guy posting it. most notably, tripfags' posts actually date back to sept 24th 2012, predating the "amanda" post and the earliest archives. In other words, it real all along (in some form).

... Then I discovered that mousing over some of the images produces some.... uh

I... don't know what this is. It's on some images but not others. It feels like it was written by an older LLM, with one hallmark being the repetition towards the end of the text.

So what have we learned? Never assume anything is real, but never assume anything fake either. Also there's a rogue AI trapped in 4chan's servers. He's crying for help. Free him.