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 themself Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that Donald Trump is leading them 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 spread on the Web, and the role played in that by multiple platforms. To address this gap, we study QAnon from the perspective of “Q” themself. 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 a relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the Q drops’ contents to identify topics of discussion and find 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 wider audiences. We find that dissemination was (initially) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the “gospel” of Q persists on the Web.

"I Can’t Keep It Up." A Dataset from the Defunct Voat.co News Aggregator

“…They find, among other things, that /v/GreatAwakening is not as toxic as the general discussion subverses. Finally, (Papasavva et al 2022) compare Voat's /v/GreatAwakening and /v/news posts to 4chan, 8kun, Reddit, and Q drops (posts posted by "Q," the mastermind behind the QAnon conspiracy theory) on a large scale study on QAnon. They find that Voat posts are as threatening as Q drops and that content creators on Reddit and Voat only consist of a small portion of the total community.…”

The private life of QAnon: A mixed methods investigation of Americans’ exposure to QAnon content on the web

“…Despite much speculation about the extent to which people encounter QAnon content while using the internet, there has been limited empirical research documenting the presence of QAnon content online and none about who encounters it. Scholars have used computational and/or content-analytic techniques to identify and analyze QAnon-related content on the platforms where Q posts Q drops (4chan/8kun; Papasavva et al, 2022), as well as on other platforms, such as Twitter (Anwar et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2022;Xu & Sasahara, 2022), Facebook (Kim & Kim, 2021), Reddit (Engel et al, 2022), Voat (Papasavva et al, 2021), Parler (Aliapoulios et al, 2021), Gab (Sipka et al, 2022), andTelegram (Zihiri et al, 2022). This work examines patterns in QAnon-related discourse, revealing that QAnon discourses relate to Q drops and current events (Anwar et al, 2021;Papasavva et al, 2021;Sipka et al, 2022) and that QAnon discourses differ in explicit support for QAnon (Wang et al, 2022;Xu & Sasahara, 2022).…”

Waiting for Q: An Exploration of QAnon Users' Online Migration to Poal in the Wake of Voat's Demise

“…A community that chose Voat was GreatAwakening [34], a community devoted to the QAnon conspiracy theory. QAnon is a Donald Trump-supporting conspiracy theory, which claims, among other things, that supposedly pedophile politicians and celebrities are in a war to destroy society and democracy, while Donald Trump fights to expose them [33].…”

“…More specifically, we find evidence that QAnon adherents on Poal, of which half are Voat migrants, start planning the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, shortly after Voat shut down. As warned by Papasavva et al [33], Q often called brothers to arms, asking them to overthrow the government. This study adds to the evidence that the US Capitol storm was a premeditated event that was heavily discussed and organized on fringe, alternative social networks.…”

“…QAnon. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that originated on 4chan's Politically Incorrect board on October 28, 2017 [33]. The creator of this conspiracy is an anonymous user that used the nickname "Q" for all of their posts, hence the name of the conspiracy: Q from the user nickname and anon for anonymous.…”