“Is it a Qoincidence?”: A First Step Towards Understanding and Characterizing the QAnon Movement on Voat.co Antonis Papasavva1, Jeremy Blackburn2 Gianluca Stringhini3, Savvas Zannettou4, and Emiliano De Cristofaro1 1University College London, 2Binghamton University, 3Boston University, 4Max Planck Institute for Informatics
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[email protected] – iDRAMA Lab – Abstract media platforms has helped the spread of conspiracy theo- ries in general, and politically oriented ones in particular. Online fringe communities offer fertile grounds for users to For instance, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory emerged during seek and share paranoid ideas fueling suspicion of mainstream the 2016 US presidential elections, claiming that candidate news, and outright conspiracy theories. Among these, the Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile ring [40]. Even QAnon conspiracy theory has emerged in 2017 on 4chan, when widely debunked, conspiracy theories can help motivate broadly supporting the idea that powerful politicians, aristo- detractors and demotivate supporters, thus potentially threat- crats, and celebrities are closely engaged in a global pedophile ening democracies. ring. At the same time, governments are thought to be con- Over the past few years, a new conspiracy, known as trolled by “puppet masters,” as democratically elected offi- “QAnon,” has emerged that is somewhat related to Pizzagate. cials serve as a fake showroom of democracy. It originated on the anonymous Politically Incorrect (/pol/) In this paper, we provide an empirical exploratory anal- board of 4chan by a user going by the nickname “Q,” who ysis of the QAnon community on Voat.co, a Reddit-esque posted numerous threads claiming to be a US government news aggregator, which has recently captured the interest official with a top-secret Q clearance, in October 2017 [10].