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

Abstract

Many controversial and hateful online communities on mainstream social networks get banned due to moderation efforts. One of the platforms known to have taken such measures is Reddit, which banned various communities and users in recent years. Although banning these communities eliminates the problem on one platform, the participants of those communities often tend to regroup on other, laxer alternative social networks. One alternative to Reddit was Voat, a Reddit-like social network that allowed its users to share their controversial ideas freely. Voat bloomed and became more popular with every Reddit ban and, although it had a troubled history, it managed to stay afloat for four years before shutting down in December 2020.In this work, we investigate the Voat shutdown and how the users of the conspiracy theory QAnon organized their online migration. We find that many users proposed Poal as a Voat alternative, resulting in about half of the QAnon user base of Voat migrating there. In addition, we find that only a few Voat users lost hope close to the end of Voat, turning against Q, while others encouraged their fellow conspiracy adherents to "wait for Q" to tell them where to go. Lastly, we find evidence that shortly after the Voat shutdown, users on Poal (most of them Voat migrants), start discussing and planning the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

iDRAMA-Scored-2024: A Dataset of the Scored Social Media Platform from 2020 to 2023

“…Reddit banned r/greatawakening in September 2018, leading to a migration to the Voat platform (Papasavva et al 2021). Following Voat's shutdown on December 25th, 2020 (Papasavva and Mariconti 2023), this community potentially migrated to greatawakening.win, which co-exists under the ecosystem of Communities.win (now Scored). Additionally, Papasavva and Mariconti (Papasavva and Mariconti 2023) confirm that following Voat's shutdown, users primarily considered migrating to greatawakening.win and Poal, an alternate platform.…”