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Social Impacts, Global Reach, and the Mystery of 'Q'
by Ethnology TechnologyDecember 7th, 2024
Too Long; Didn't Read
QAnon supporters have been implicated in a variety of criminal incidents and violent events. The violence of the QAnon believers is not unprecedented nor unmatched on social networks. The singularity of this online group mostly resides in how much its theories have spread.
Authors:
(1) Florian Cafiero (ORCID 0000-0002-1951-6942), Sciences Po, Medialab;
(2) Jean-Baptiste Camps (ORCID 0000-0003-0385-7037), Ecole nationale des chartes, Universite Paris, Sciences & Lettres.
Table of Links
Why work on QAnon? Specificities and social impact
Who is Q? The theories put to test
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
Why work on QAnon? Specificities and social impact
The violence of the QAnon believers is not unprecedented nor unmatched on social networks. For instance, discussions around QAnon on Voat, a Redditlike forum attracting many alt-right and QAnon supporters, even show less toxicity than elsewhere in average on the rest of this admittedly very specific platform (Papasavva et al., 2021). The singularity of this online group mostly resides in how much its theories have spread, and on its important consequences in real life.
Considered a potential domestic terrorist threat by the FBI since 2018 (Winter, 2019), the most radical QAnon supporters were implicated in a variety of criminal incidents and violent events (Garry et al., 2021). Recent research has shown that, beyond political orientation, the main common trait between people arrested for breaking into the United States Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021 (Kaplan, 2021) was that they believed in the QAnon narrative. Documented in the press (Gilbert, 2021), the high impact of the QAnon theories on the social life of its believers has been compared to the “conversion to a cult or high-pressure religious group” (Kaplan, 2021).
QAnon also affected people far beyond the U.S. borders, spreading in particular through social media and instant messaging software. A large-scale study on QAnon on Telegram for instance showed that messages in German even outnumbered at some point the posts written in English, and that posts in German and Portuguese used an even more “toxic” language (Hoseini et al., 2021).
Who is Q? The theories put to test
Theories regarding the author behind the posts signed “Q” fit into two main categories. Believers in the authenticity of the source argue that a single source or a collective of people from U.S. intelligence agencies would have authored the various posts. Persons cited as a plausible author or coauthor of Q range from General Michael Flynn to Donald J. Trump or his entourage (Huback, 2021).
A second group of theory states that one person would have posted as Q, but without having any specific access to exclusive and reliable sources. NBC reporters claimed that they had traced the success of QAnon to three people: ‘Pamphlet Anon’, a.k.a. Coleman R., ‘BaruchtheScribe’, a.k.a. Paul F., and ‘Tracy Beanz’, a.k.a. Tracy D.(Zadrozny and Collins, 2018).
Frederick Brennan, inventor of 8chan, claims that Ron and John W. are paying someone to carry on as Q, or are even acting as Q themselves (Huback, 2021). The third group of theories holds that Q is a collective, with a small number of people sharing access to the account. This third category “includes the notion that Q is a new kind of open-source military-intelligence agency” (LaFrance, 2020).
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
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