The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

Abstract

The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) blood thirsty politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By interpreting cryptic "drops" of information from an anonymous insider calling themselves Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that they are being led by Donald Trump in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been covered extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in multiple violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little understanding of how the theory evolved and was spread on the Web, and the role played in that by multiple platforms.To address this gap, in this paper we study QAnon from the perspective of "Q" themself. Specifically, we build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected from six "aggregation sites," which curate and archive them from their original posting to anonymous and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites have relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the contents of the Q drops themselves, identifying topics of discussion, as well as finding statistically significant indications that drops were not authored by a single individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit are used to disseminate Q drops to a wider audience. We find that dissemination was (originally) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed content moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the "gospel" of Q persists on Web communities.

Soros, Child Sacrifices, and 5G: Understanding the Spread of Conspiracy Theories on Web Communities

“…We use Google's Perspective API [1] to measure the toxicity of the discussion surrounding the conspiracy theories. We use the Severe Toxicity model to characterize this aspect since previous work found it more reliable and less prone to "false positives" when measuring toxic speech [3,13,30].…”

“…Our qualitative analysis finds that /r/news, /r/politics, and /r/worldnews merely report on the conspiracy theories without delving into the details. Looking at Twitter, we find that the platform users are mostly critical of the conspiracies and the 3 A person who sent pipe bombs to Democratic officials in 2020. actors spreading them. Conversely, more politically polarized communities (e.g., /r/The_Donald) primarily discuss the conspiracy to defend the actors involved in it.…”

“…Conspiracy theories have been a constant presence throughout modern history, and the rise of online social networks has significantly broadened their reach. Users are increasingly exposed to them, from plots to control people through COVID vaccines [14] to claims of mass shootings being false flag incidents [35] or that child-eating cabals are controlling the United States [3]. These conspiracy theories can have serious adverse effects on society, from fostering polarization to hindering the adoption of public health measures.…”

Characterizing Social Imaginaries and Self-Disclosures of Dissonance in Online Conspiracy Discussion Communities

“…Specifically, previous studies explored the topics and dissemination of Q's messages on various online platforms and found that QAnon borrows theories from other conspiracies such as Pizzagate [60], shares moral values with Christian theology [53] and QAnon followers are likely to use violent rhetoric on Twitter [65]. While the existing studies provide valuable characterization of the QAnon movement across platforms [1], deeper psychological and sociological exploration is required to deter increased engagement with QAnon [35]. Our work fills this gap by first establishing QAnon social imaginaries symbolizing collective interpretation of reality by QAnon and then using those imaginaries to identify expressions of dissonance in the QAnon community.…”

“…We use qalerts.app, a website that aggregates Q-drops from image boards. While the exact agency of qalerts.app is unknown, it is a common resource used by QAnon communities 1 and also by other researchers studying QAnon [1]. There are several other Q-drop aggregation sites across internet however, most of the sites contain nearly similar record of Q posts (see Table 1 in Aliapoulios et al [1]).…”