Who is behind QAnon, then? Detectives who study language Fingerprints can be found. “Open your eyes,” a comment on a website said. “Many in our government believe in the Devil.”
As of October 2017, the movement known as QAnon had its start with this warning. It was posted on a freewheeling online message board in October of that year. Paul Furber was the church’s first leader.
Mr. Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist who has been interested in American politics and conspiracy theories for a long time, agreed with the outlandish claim. On the internet, he kept believing that liberal Satanists were taking kids from a Washington restaurant and selling them to other people. This is called “Pizzagate.” He was also one of the few people who knew about “Operation Mockingbird,” an alleged C.I.A. plan to control the information media.
As the stream of messages, mostly signed “Q,” turned into a huge conspiracy theory, the mystery of who wrote them became a big part of its followers’ interest. Who was the nameless Q?
One of the first people on the Internet to pay attention to the earliest messages, Mr. Furber, was in charge of writing them, say two groups of forensic linguists who looked at the Q texts.
Ron Watkins, a QAnon supporter who ran an internet site where Q messages first started to show up in 2018, is now running for Congress in Arizona. Sleuths have been ignoring Mr. Furber more and more as they search for the person who wrote the messages. As well, the scientists say they found proof to back up these suspicions as well. It looks like Mr. Watkins has been taking over from Mr. Furber at the start of 2018. They say they don’t write as Q.
The research shows for the first time that someone came up with the poisonous QAnon delusion, and the scientists who did the research said they hoped that naming the creators would weaken the delusion’s grip on QAnon followers. Some polls say that a lot of people still think that Q is a high-ranking member of the military who sends messages that say that former President Trump will save the world from a group of “deep state” Democratic paedophiles. There have been a lot of violent incidents linked to QAnon, and many of the attackers who stormed the Capitol last year were followers. The FBI has called the movement a possible terrorist threat.
The forensic analyses haven’t been reported before. Two well-known linguistic detectives who looked over the findings for The Instances said that the conclusions were credible and convincing.
Phone interview: Mr. Furber, 55, didn’t dispute that Q’s writing looked a lot like his own in the interview. Q’s posts had a big impact on him, so much so that they changed his writing, he said.
Q’s messages “took over our lives, in fact,” Mr. Furber said. “All of us started to speak like him,” says the man.
Linguistic experts said that was not possible, and the scientists who did the research said that they looked at tweets by Mr. Furber from the first few days that Q started.
On the phone, Mr. Watkins said, “I’m not Q.”
However, he also said that the posts were good. “There are probably more good things than bad,” he said, citing as examples “fighting for the safety of the country and for the safety of the children of the country.” Signs in the Republican primary refer to him as “CodeMonkeyZ,” which is the name he uses in QAnon circles. He said that a lot of the help for his campaign came from the movement. Mr. Watkins, 34, relies mostly on small donors to raise money, but he isn’t as successful as the people in the first group. A consultant from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a consultant from Colorado have both been elected in 2020.
The two analyses, one by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of OrphAnalytics, a Swiss start-up, and the other by the French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps, were both based on well-known types of forensic linguistics that can tell if two texts were written by the same person. For example, James Madison used “while” instead of “wherefore,” and Alexander Hamilton often used “upon” instead of “upon.”
Because they didn’t want to trust their own judgement, the computer scientists used a mathematical method called stylometry. Practitioners say they’ve changed the art of the old research with a new type of science, which has led to results that can be measured, consistent, and repeatable.
Subtle software broke down the Q texts into patterns of three-character sequences and kept track of how often each possible combination came up.
Their method doesn’t focus on words that are memorable or unique in the way that earlier forensic linguists usually did. However, the people who use stylometry know that they can figure out how many mistakes their software makes.
The Swiss group said its accuracy rate was about 93%. This is what the French group said about its software: It correctly identified Mr. Watkins’ writing in 99 percent of the checks and Mr. Furber’s in 98 percent of them.
Machine learning showed that J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, wrote the 2013 thriller “Cuckoo’s Calling” under a different pen name. In order to show that Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber, the F.B.I. used a type of stylometry to show that. In the last few years, detectives in the United States and Great Britain have used these methods to solve homicide cases that involved a person who took their own life and faked text messages.
After Swiss scientists did a preliminary study that showed that the writing had changed over time, the groups studying Q got in touch with each other. Every group used a completely different way to do things. The Swiss scientists used software to look for three-character patterns that were similar in a lot of different texts and to look at how complicated the vocabulary and syntax were. They used a type of artificial intelligence that learns how an author writes in the same way that facial-recognition software learns how people look.
More than 100,000 words were written by Q, and at least 12,000 words were written by each of the 13 other writers the groups studied.
Gerald McMenamin, a well-known forensic linguist who is critical of the machine-learning methods, said he doubted that software could pick out the telltale differences in the Q messages because of the unique voice used in them. The messages are full of short sentences, cryptic statements, military jargon, and Socratic questions.
Paul Furber said that Q’s messages “took over our lives.” “All of us started to speak like him,” says the man.
To make sure the software didn’t get confused by texts from different types or genres, the scientists compared writing samples that were all the same kind: social media posts, mostly tweets. And the writings by Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins were the only ones that looked like Q’s.
David Hoover, an English professor at New York University who specialises in author identification, said the scientists seemed to be able to handle the problem of Q’s unique voice. He thought the work was “fairly convincing,” he said.
“I’d buy it,” said Patrick Juola of Duquesne University, a mathematician who knew that J.K. Rowling was the author of “Cuckoo’s Calling.”
Dr. Juola said that the fact that both of the two independent analyses found the same total sample is very important.
Both groups didn’t rule out the possibility that other people could have written Q’s hundreds of messages, especially during a time when Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins worked together in late 2017.
Scientists, on the other hand, used different things to narrow down the list of possible authors to check. That evidence, the scientists said, made them more sure that they had found the real authors.
There were some people who thought that some of the commentators who claimed to have found Q messages were actually writing them. This was in the middle of 2018. With no knowledge, how could anyone have found these almost nonsensical postings in the web stream? An NBC report from the summer of that year named Q’s first supporters as Mr. Furber (known on the internet as Baruch the Scribe) and three others. The report said that the three other people could have had money in mind because they had asked for money for “Q “analysis.” (Mr. Furber didn’t, though.)
The Swiss group looked at writings by these four people, as well as by Mr. Watkins and his father, who owns the message board.
It wasn’t enough for the French scientists to look at these six possible authors. They also added seven more to the mix. There were tweets from another person who was a supporter of Q who lived near the Watkinses. They also looked at tweets from President Trump and his family. They looked at tweets from Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser; Roger Stone, his political advisor; and Dan Scavino, a Trump White House deputy chief of staff.
In the beginning, most of the text is by Furber, said Mr. Cafiero, who works for the French National Center for Scientific Research. During the first few months, Ron Watkins’s signature grew, but Paul Furber’s dropped and then disappeared.
In an interview, Mr. Furber said that he got his love for American politics from his parents, who had taught in Canada and travelled around the United States when they were younger. He visited a lot while he was working on software and writing for business publications.
He said that his interest in conspiracy theories began with questions about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Then, around 1996, he found a website that was making up stories about the suicide of Vincent Foster, the Clinton White House counsel, and other false deaths that were said to be linked to the Clintons. “That made me want to learn more,” he said.
People who study QAnon say that the early Q messages, which they say are similar to Mr. Furber’s writing, lay out the core QAnon myths and slogans that other messages repeat. That was also when Mr. Furber and other early promoters helped pique the interest of YouTube creators who spread the word.
However, at the start of 2018, each study found that the writing had changed a lot. If you look at the 2017 posts, they were full of Socratic questions. Later posts have been more declarative and expository, with a lot more use of exclamation points and words written in all capital letters. In the past, Q shared web memes.
In the last few days, the Q messages had moved from an older message board to the one run by Ron Watkins and owned by his father, Jim, which was called 8chan and now 8kun. Ron Watkins runs that message board. Jim Watkins, a former U.S. military helicopter repairman who moved to the Philippines, also owned pig and honey farms and tried his hand at on-line pornography. A pro-Trump conspiracy-minded website was set up by him and his son during the 2016 election.
During the first few months of 2018, there was a noticeable change in the writing style. This was also the case with the Q account and Ron Watkins. After a period of confusion, the person writing as Q asked Mr. Watkins to prove that the messages were still coming from the original Q. Mr. Watkins did it right away, and then Q said that all future posts would only be on Mr. Watkins’s platform.
Mr. Furber began to say that Q had been “hijacked” and that Mr. Watkins was involved.
They said that Ron Watkins wrote all of the messages. “When QAnon started to do well, one of them took charge,” said Mr. Roten, the CEO of OrphAnalytics, who runs the company.
Fredrick Brennan, who started the message board that the Watkinses now own, told a podcast in 2020 that Q was invented by Mr. Furber without proof. HBO’s “Q: Into the Storm” made a strong case that Ron Watkins was behind the messages. In a brief scene, Mr. Watkins seemed to say that he had written as Q. Then, he smiled, laughed, and kept saying that he didn’t know.
Q hasn’t written anything since December 2020.
In an interview, Mr. Furber said that he thought QAnon was “an operation that has run its course.” He said he was still sure that it was done by a real insider “to make people aware of this huge secret fight against the cabal,” and that “the next part is coming.”
In a web-based memoir about the QAnon movement, he talks about how he misses the early days before “the hijacking.” Q’s messages, he says, seemed to back up conspiracy theories he had been believing for years. They linked the Clintons and George Soros to the Rothschilds and the Illuminati.
This is how Mr. Furber says it: “We have been given a first-hand look at the ugly and corrupt world of geopolitics.”
Gabriel Gianordoli made this.
