Posted on Feb 21, 2022
Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
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“Open your eyes,” the online post began, claiming, “Many in our govt worship Satan.”
That warning, published on a freewheeling online message board in October 2017, was the beginning of the movement now known as QAnon. Paul Furber was its first apostle.
The outlandish claim made perfect sense to Mr. Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist long fascinated with American politics and conspiracy theories, he said in an interview. He still clung to “Pizzagate,” the debunked online lie that liberal Satanists were trafficking children from a Washington restaurant. He was also among the few who understood an obscure reference in the message to “Operation Mockingbird,” an alleged C.I.A. scheme to manipulate the news media.
That warning, published on a freewheeling online message board in October 2017, was the beginning of the movement now known as QAnon. Paul Furber was its first apostle.
The outlandish claim made perfect sense to Mr. Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist long fascinated with American politics and conspiracy theories, he said in an interview. He still clung to “Pizzagate,” the debunked online lie that liberal Satanists were trafficking children from a Washington restaurant. He was also among the few who understood an obscure reference in the message to “Operation Mockingbird,” an alleged C.I.A. scheme to manipulate the news media.
Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
Posted from nytimes.com
Conspiracy Theories
Journalism
Washington
Media
Posted 2 y ago
Responses: 3
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."The Swiss staff mentioned its accuracy charge was about 93 p.c. The French staff mentioned its software program appropriately recognized Mr. Watkins’s writing in 99 p.c of checks and Mr. Furber’s in 98 p.c.
Machine studying revealed that J.Ok. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, had written the 2013 thriller “Cuckoo’s Calling” beneath one other pen title. The F.B.I. used a type of stylometry to point out that Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber. In recent times, such strategies have helped detectives in america and Britain clear up homicide circumstances involving a solid suicide observe and faked textual content messages.
The groups finding out Q obtained in contact with one another after the Swiss scientists launched an earlier, preliminary research exhibiting that the writing had modified over time. Every staff utilized totally different strategies. The Swiss scientists used software program to measure similarities within the three-character patterns throughout a number of texts whereas evaluating the complexity of vocabulary and syntax. The French staff used a type of synthetic intelligence that learns the patterns of an creator’s writing in roughly the identical means that facial-recognition software program learns human options.
The groups shared textual content samples, together with greater than 100,000 phrases by Q and at the least 12,000 phrases by every of the 13 different writers they analyzed.
Gerald McMenamin of the College of Nevada, Reno, a famend forensic linguist essential of the machine-learning strategies, mentioned he doubted that software program may select the telltale particular person variations from the quirks of the distinctive voice assumed within the Q messages — stuffed with quick sentences, cryptic statements, army jargon and Socratic questions.
Q’s messages “took over our lives, actually,” Paul Furber mentioned. “All of us began speaking like him.”
To counter the hazard that texts spanning totally different varieties or genres would possibly confuse the software program, the scientists mentioned, they in contrast different writing samples that had been all the similar kind: social media posts, primarily tweets. And the writings by Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins stood out over all of the others in similarity to Q’s.
David Hoover, an English professor at New York College and an skilled in creator identification, mentioned the scientists appeared to successfully tackle the potential downside of Q’s distinctive voice. He discovered the work “fairly persuasive,” he mentioned.
“I’d purchase it,” mentioned Patrick Juola of Duquesne College, a mathematician who recognized Ms. Rowling because the creator of “Cuckoo’s Calling.”
“What’s actually highly effective is the truth that each of the 2 impartial analyses confirmed the identical total sample,” Dr. Juola added.
Neither staff dominated out the chance that different writers had contributed to Q’s hundreds of messages, particularly throughout what seems to have been a interval of collaboration between Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins round late 2017.
However the scientists relied on different details to slender the listing of possible writers to check. That proof, the scientists mentioned, elevated their confidence that that they had unmasked the primary authors.
Some QAnon followers had begun to suspect as early as mid-2018 that a number of of the commentators who first claimed to stumble onto the Q messages had really written them. With out prior information, how may anybody have plucked these virtually nonsensical postings out of the web torrent? An NBC news report that summer season recognized Q’s earliest boosters as Mr. Furber (recognized on-line as Baruch the Scribe) and three others. The report emphasised that the three others had doable monetary motives for stoking the craze as a result of that they had solicited donations for Q “analysis.” (Mr. Furber didn’t.)
The Swiss staff studied writings by these 4, in addition to by Mr. Watkins and his father, who owns the message board.
Along with analyzing these six potential authors, the French scientists added seven extra to the combination. They examined tweets by one other on-line Q booster near the Watkinses in addition to by Mr. Trump, his spouse, Melania, his son Eric, and three others near the previous president who had publicly inspired QAnon: Michael T. Flynn, his onetime nationwide safety adviser; the political marketing consultant Roger Stone; and Dan Scavino, a Trump White Home deputy chief of employees.
“At first many of the textual content is by Furber,” mentioned Mr. Cafiero, who works on the French Nationwide Middle for Scientific Analysis. “However the signature of Ron Watkins elevated through the first few months as Paul Furber decreased after which dropped fully.”
Mr. Furber mentioned in an interview that he had inherited his ardour for American politics from his mother and father, who had taught in Canada and traveled round america. He visited typically whereas constructing a profession in software program improvement and writing for commerce publications.
His fascination with conspiracy theories, he mentioned, started with questions on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Then, round 1996, he discovered a website spinning different tales in regards to the suicide of Vincent Foster, the Clinton White Home counsel, and different deaths mentioned to be linked to the Clintons. “That kind of kicked off my curiosity,” he mentioned.
The early Q messages, which the scientists say resemble Mr. Furber’s writing, lay out the core QAnon myths and slogans that later messages repeat. That was additionally when Mr. Furber and some different early promoters helped entice the curiosity of entrepreneurial YouTube creators who amplified the messages.
However firstly of 2018, each research discovered, the writing modified conspicuously. The place the 2017 posts had been stuffed with Socratic questions, the later posts had been extra declarative and expository, with heavy use of exclamation factors and phrases written in all capital letters. Generally, Q shared web memes.
The Q messages had not too long ago jumped from an older message board to the one run by Ron Watkins and owned by his father, Jim — the location recognized then as 8chan and now as 8kun. Jim Watkins, a former U.S. Military helicopter repairman who had settled within the Philippines, additionally owned pig and honey farms and dabbled within the on-line pornography enterprise. Across the 2016 election, he had created a conspiracy-minded pro-Trump web site, together with his son overseeing the technical aspect.
The evident change in writing model firstly of 2018 coincided with an uncommon trade between the Q account and Ron Watkins. After a interval of confusion, whoever was writing as Q publicly requested Mr. Watkins to verify that the messages had been nonetheless coming from the unique Q. Mr. Watkins instantly did, after which Q declared all future posts would seem solely on Mr. Watkins’s platform.
Mr. Furber started complaining that Q had been “hijacked” and that Mr. Watkins was complicit.
From then on, the scientists mentioned, the messages very intently matched the writing of Ron Watkins alone. “When QAnon began to achieve success, one among them took management,” mentioned Mr. Roten of OrphAnalytics.
In a podcast interview in 2020, Fredrick Brennan, who began the message board that the Watkinses now personal, asserted with out proof that Q was the invention of Mr. Furber. An HBO documentary launched final yr, “Q: Into the Storm,” constructed a case that Ron Watkins was behind the messages, and in it Mr. Watkins briefly seemed to admit that he had written as Q. He then smiled, laughed and resumed his denials.
Q has now gone silent, with out posting a message since December 2020.
Mr. Furber, in an interview, mentioned he believed that QAnon was “an operation that has run its course.” He mentioned he was nonetheless satisfied that it was orchestrated by a real insider “to awaken folks to this huge secret struggle in opposition to the cabal,” and that “the following section is coming.”
In a web based memoir he posted in regards to the QAnon motion, he writes wistfully in regards to the early days earlier than “the hijacking.” Q’s messages, he says, appeared to validate conspiracy theories he had subscribed to for years — tying the Clintons and George Soros to the Rothschilds and the Illuminati.
“Like a toddler being taken round his father’s workshop for the primary time,” Mr. Furber writes, “we had been being given a behind-the-scenes look into the ugly and corrupt world of geopolitics.”
..."The Swiss staff mentioned its accuracy charge was about 93 p.c. The French staff mentioned its software program appropriately recognized Mr. Watkins’s writing in 99 p.c of checks and Mr. Furber’s in 98 p.c.
Machine studying revealed that J.Ok. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, had written the 2013 thriller “Cuckoo’s Calling” beneath one other pen title. The F.B.I. used a type of stylometry to point out that Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber. In recent times, such strategies have helped detectives in america and Britain clear up homicide circumstances involving a solid suicide observe and faked textual content messages.
The groups finding out Q obtained in contact with one another after the Swiss scientists launched an earlier, preliminary research exhibiting that the writing had modified over time. Every staff utilized totally different strategies. The Swiss scientists used software program to measure similarities within the three-character patterns throughout a number of texts whereas evaluating the complexity of vocabulary and syntax. The French staff used a type of synthetic intelligence that learns the patterns of an creator’s writing in roughly the identical means that facial-recognition software program learns human options.
The groups shared textual content samples, together with greater than 100,000 phrases by Q and at the least 12,000 phrases by every of the 13 different writers they analyzed.
Gerald McMenamin of the College of Nevada, Reno, a famend forensic linguist essential of the machine-learning strategies, mentioned he doubted that software program may select the telltale particular person variations from the quirks of the distinctive voice assumed within the Q messages — stuffed with quick sentences, cryptic statements, army jargon and Socratic questions.
Q’s messages “took over our lives, actually,” Paul Furber mentioned. “All of us began speaking like him.”
To counter the hazard that texts spanning totally different varieties or genres would possibly confuse the software program, the scientists mentioned, they in contrast different writing samples that had been all the similar kind: social media posts, primarily tweets. And the writings by Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins stood out over all of the others in similarity to Q’s.
David Hoover, an English professor at New York College and an skilled in creator identification, mentioned the scientists appeared to successfully tackle the potential downside of Q’s distinctive voice. He discovered the work “fairly persuasive,” he mentioned.
“I’d purchase it,” mentioned Patrick Juola of Duquesne College, a mathematician who recognized Ms. Rowling because the creator of “Cuckoo’s Calling.”
“What’s actually highly effective is the truth that each of the 2 impartial analyses confirmed the identical total sample,” Dr. Juola added.
Neither staff dominated out the chance that different writers had contributed to Q’s hundreds of messages, particularly throughout what seems to have been a interval of collaboration between Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins round late 2017.
However the scientists relied on different details to slender the listing of possible writers to check. That proof, the scientists mentioned, elevated their confidence that that they had unmasked the primary authors.
Some QAnon followers had begun to suspect as early as mid-2018 that a number of of the commentators who first claimed to stumble onto the Q messages had really written them. With out prior information, how may anybody have plucked these virtually nonsensical postings out of the web torrent? An NBC news report that summer season recognized Q’s earliest boosters as Mr. Furber (recognized on-line as Baruch the Scribe) and three others. The report emphasised that the three others had doable monetary motives for stoking the craze as a result of that they had solicited donations for Q “analysis.” (Mr. Furber didn’t.)
The Swiss staff studied writings by these 4, in addition to by Mr. Watkins and his father, who owns the message board.
Along with analyzing these six potential authors, the French scientists added seven extra to the combination. They examined tweets by one other on-line Q booster near the Watkinses in addition to by Mr. Trump, his spouse, Melania, his son Eric, and three others near the previous president who had publicly inspired QAnon: Michael T. Flynn, his onetime nationwide safety adviser; the political marketing consultant Roger Stone; and Dan Scavino, a Trump White Home deputy chief of employees.
“At first many of the textual content is by Furber,” mentioned Mr. Cafiero, who works on the French Nationwide Middle for Scientific Analysis. “However the signature of Ron Watkins elevated through the first few months as Paul Furber decreased after which dropped fully.”
Mr. Furber mentioned in an interview that he had inherited his ardour for American politics from his mother and father, who had taught in Canada and traveled round america. He visited typically whereas constructing a profession in software program improvement and writing for commerce publications.
His fascination with conspiracy theories, he mentioned, started with questions on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Then, round 1996, he discovered a website spinning different tales in regards to the suicide of Vincent Foster, the Clinton White Home counsel, and different deaths mentioned to be linked to the Clintons. “That kind of kicked off my curiosity,” he mentioned.
The early Q messages, which the scientists say resemble Mr. Furber’s writing, lay out the core QAnon myths and slogans that later messages repeat. That was additionally when Mr. Furber and some different early promoters helped entice the curiosity of entrepreneurial YouTube creators who amplified the messages.
However firstly of 2018, each research discovered, the writing modified conspicuously. The place the 2017 posts had been stuffed with Socratic questions, the later posts had been extra declarative and expository, with heavy use of exclamation factors and phrases written in all capital letters. Generally, Q shared web memes.
The Q messages had not too long ago jumped from an older message board to the one run by Ron Watkins and owned by his father, Jim — the location recognized then as 8chan and now as 8kun. Jim Watkins, a former U.S. Military helicopter repairman who had settled within the Philippines, additionally owned pig and honey farms and dabbled within the on-line pornography enterprise. Across the 2016 election, he had created a conspiracy-minded pro-Trump web site, together with his son overseeing the technical aspect.
The evident change in writing model firstly of 2018 coincided with an uncommon trade between the Q account and Ron Watkins. After a interval of confusion, whoever was writing as Q publicly requested Mr. Watkins to verify that the messages had been nonetheless coming from the unique Q. Mr. Watkins instantly did, after which Q declared all future posts would seem solely on Mr. Watkins’s platform.
Mr. Furber started complaining that Q had been “hijacked” and that Mr. Watkins was complicit.
From then on, the scientists mentioned, the messages very intently matched the writing of Ron Watkins alone. “When QAnon began to achieve success, one among them took management,” mentioned Mr. Roten of OrphAnalytics.
In a podcast interview in 2020, Fredrick Brennan, who began the message board that the Watkinses now personal, asserted with out proof that Q was the invention of Mr. Furber. An HBO documentary launched final yr, “Q: Into the Storm,” constructed a case that Ron Watkins was behind the messages, and in it Mr. Watkins briefly seemed to admit that he had written as Q. He then smiled, laughed and resumed his denials.
Q has now gone silent, with out posting a message since December 2020.
Mr. Furber, in an interview, mentioned he believed that QAnon was “an operation that has run its course.” He mentioned he was nonetheless satisfied that it was orchestrated by a real insider “to awaken folks to this huge secret struggle in opposition to the cabal,” and that “the following section is coming.”
In a web based memoir he posted in regards to the QAnon motion, he writes wistfully in regards to the early days earlier than “the hijacking.” Q’s messages, he says, appeared to validate conspiracy theories he had subscribed to for years — tying the Clintons and George Soros to the Rothschilds and the Illuminati.
“Like a toddler being taken round his father’s workshop for the primary time,” Mr. Furber writes, “we had been being given a behind-the-scenes look into the ugly and corrupt world of geopolitics.”
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I never did get Qanon. I mean Trump never had a problem with expressing in candid terms how he felt. What was the point of Qanon?
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SPC Kevin Ford
People love to feel like they know something secret, that they know what's really going on and they love to be part of a community that all thinks as they do. Qanon, Alex Jones, etc; they all play off those basic human traits. That's also why we have Scientology (sorry to any Scientology believers). The ground is fertile.
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