The far-right QAnon conspiracy made national headlines as Trump supporters—including many self-professed QAnon believers—stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Although the Capitol siege thrust QAnon into the national spotlight, the conspiracy theory has been linked with numerous violent attacks since the first “Q drop” in 2017, including murder, bomb threats, kidnapping, and attacks on public infrastructure. In May 2019, over a year before the Capitol attacks, an FBI bulletin described the growing threat of “fringe conspiracy theory” driven “domestic extremists,” specifically citing QAnon as a group of concern. This bulletin highlighted that “certain conspiracy theory narratives tacitly support or legitimize violent action,” motivating their adherents to commit violent acts. This text analysis project aims to better understand QAnon narratives, particularly the way that those narratives have changed over time as QAnon was pushed to increasingly fringe platforms.
Background
The Origins of QAnon
The first widely recognized “Q drop,” or QAnon post, appeared on 4chan’s /pol/ message board in October 2017, with an anonymous post claiming that Hillary Clinton would be arrested the following Monday. The poster, “Q Clearance Patriot,” claimed to be a high-level government agent with top-secret “Q-level” security clearance. QAnon quickly gained a dedicated following, and by 2018 was named one of the “25 Most Influential People on the Internet” by Time Magazine. Part of the allure and popularity of QAnon has been attributed to its participatory nature, which resembles a popular genre of alternate reality games. As the Financial Times explains,
The movement is gaining ground partly because its modus operandi — followers deconstruct cryptic clues from a government “insider” to uncover the hideous plot — emulates the addictive qualities of a Larp.
While Larps have existed on forums like 4chan for years, QAnon fans reflect an older demographic than traditional 4chan posters and may be less critical of information they come across on these image boards than the younger generation of internet natives.
After a few months on 4chan, Q announced that the platform had been “infiltrated” and moved to the 8chan board /cbts/, which stands for “calm before the storm,” owned by a South African man named Paul Ferber. 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan claims that while Furber was likely “the original Q,” Jim Watkins, who purchased 8chan from Brennan, eventually took control of the Q account around January 2018. Swiss company Orph Analytics confirms that QAnon dposts appear to have two distinct authors, based on stylometry analysis of all 4,953 Q drops: their analysis suggests that the account changed hands when Q began posting on 8chan in December 2017. In mid-2019, 8chan was forced offline after links to the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand and synagogue shooting in California were revealed. After several months of inactivity, Q moved to 8kun, where the account continued to make posts until December 2020. After Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in early November 2020, Q went abruptly quiet, posting only a few short drops before falling completely silent in December. In January, Watkins posted a message on Telegram that many have interpreted as a “resignation letter”:
We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able… As we enter into the next administration please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.
-@CodeMonkeyZ
QAnon has published no new drops since Watkin’s January Telegram message.