Machine Learning Reveals the Faces Behind Viral QAnon Posts

Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

Why work on QAnon? Specificities and social impact

Who is Q? The theories put to test

Authorship attribution

Results

Discussion

Corpus constitution

Quotes of authors outside of the corpus have been

Definition of two subcorpus: dealing with generic difference and an imbalanced dataset

The genre of “Q drops”: a methodological challenge

Detecting style changes: rolling stylometry

Ethical statement, Acknowledgements, and References

Abstract

A series of social media posts signed under the pseudonym “Q”, started a movement known as QAnon, which led some of its most radical supporters to violent and illegal actions. To identify the person(s) behind Q, we evaluate the coincidence between the linguistic properties of the texts written by Q and to those written by a list of suspects provided by journalistic investigation. To identify the authors of these posts, serious challenges have to be addressed.

The “Q drops” are very short texts, written in a way that constitute a sort of literary genre in itself, with very peculiar features of style. These texts might have been written by different authors, whose other writings are often hard to find. After an online ethnology of the movement, necessary to collect enough material written by these thirteen potential authors, we use supervised machine learning to build stylistic profiles for each of them. We then performed a rolling analysis on Q’s writings, to see if any of those linguistic profiles match the so-called ‘QDrops’ in part or entirety. We conclude that two different individuals, Paul F. and Ron W., are the closest match to Q’s linguistic signature, and they could have successively written Q’s texts. These potential authors are not high-ranked personality from the U.S. administration, but rather social media activists.

Introduction

The QAnon movement revolves around the posts of one or more individuals signing their message under the name “Q” on online forums. These messages first appeared in October 2017 on 4chan, a popular imageboard known for its appreciation of the anime culture, its memes, but also for its \pol\board, dedicated to “politically incorrect” contents.

Q’s messages were later on posted on 8chan (now 8kun), a competing imageboard created after 4chan, considered as a place allowing even more “free-speech”, and in particular, letting users easily create a “board” regarding the topic of their choice (Baele et al., 2021). But who wrote these messages? The QAnon supporters see in Q one or a few top-rank personalities around Donald Trump, maybe Trump himself. Journalistic investigations point on the contrary to social media activists (Zadrozny and Collins, 2018).