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Register a new userThe Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information
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Added by
Emiliano De Cristofaro
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) blood-thirsty politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By interpreting cryptic drops of information from an anonymous insider calling themself Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that Donald Trump is leading them in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been covered extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in multiple violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little understanding of how the theory evolved and spread on the Web, and the role played in that by multiple platforms. To address this gap, we study QAnon from the perspective of Q themself. We build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected from six aggregation sites, which curate and archive them from their original posting to anonymous and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites have a relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the Q drops contents to identify topics of discussion and find statistically significant indications that drops were not authored by a single individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit are used to disseminate Q drops to wider audiences. We find that dissemination was (initially) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the gospel of Q persists on the Web.
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QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that became popular and mainstream over the past few years. Worryingly, the QAnon conspiracy theory has implications in the real world, with supporters of the theory participating in real-world violent acts like the US capitol attack in 2021. At the same time, the QAnon theory started evolving into a global phenomenon by attracting followers across the globe and, in particular, in Europe. Therefore, it is imperative to understand how the QAnon theory became a worldwide phenomenon and how this dissemination has been happening in the online space. This paper performs a large-scale data analysis of QAnon through Telegram by collecting 4.5M messages posted in 161 QAnon groups/channels. Using Googles Perspective API, we analyze the toxicity of QAnon content across languages and over time. Also, using a BERT-based topic modeling approach, we analyze the QAnon discourse across multiple languages. Among other things, we find that the German language is prevalent in QAnon groups/channels on Telegram, even overshadowing English after 2020. Also, we find that content posted in German and Portuguese tends to be more toxic compared to English. Our topic modeling indicates that QAnon supporters discuss various topics of interest within far-right movements, including world politics, conspiracy theories, COVID-19, and the anti-vaccination movement. Taken all together, we perform the first multilingual study on QAnon through Telegram and paint a nuanced overview of the globalization of the QAnon theory.
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory whose followers largely organize online. In this work, we use web crawls seeded from two of the largest QAnon hotbeds on the Internet, Voat and 8kun, to build a hyperlink graph. We then use this graph to identify, understand, and learn from the websites that spread QAnon content online. We curate the largest list of QAnon centered websites to date, from which we document the types of QAnon sites, their hosting providers, as well as their popularity. We further analyze QAnon websites connection to mainstream news and misinformation online, highlighting the outsized role misinformation websites play in spreading the conspiracy. Finally, we leverage the observed relationship between QAnon and misinformation sites to build a random forest classifier that distinguishes between misinformation and authentic news sites, getting a performance of 0.98 AUC on a test set. Our results demonstrate new and effective ways to study conspiracy and misinformation on the Internet.
Rumors and conspiracy theories thrive in environments of low confidence and low trust. Consequently, it is not surprising that ones related to the Covid-19 pandemic are proliferating given the lack of any authoritative scientific consensus on the virus, its spread and containment, or on the long term social and economic ramifications of the pandemic. Among the stories currently circulating are ones suggesting that the 5G network activates the virus, that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal, that the virus is a bio-weapon released deliberately by the Chinese, or that Bill Gates is using it as cover to launch a global surveillance regime. While some may be quick to dismiss these stories as having little impact on real-world behavior, recent events including the destruction of property, racially fueled attacks against Asian Americans, and demonstrations espousing resistance to public health orders countermand such conclusions. Inspired by narrative theory, we crawl social media sites and news reports and, through the application of automated machine-learning methods, discover the underlying narrative frameworks supporting the generation of these stories. We show how the various narrative frameworks fueling rumors and conspiracy theories rely on the alignment of otherwise disparate domains of knowledge, and consider how they attach to the broader reporting on the pandemic. These alignments and attachments, which can be monitored in near real-time, may be useful for identifying areas in the news that are particularly vulnerable to reinterpretation by conspiracy theorists. Understanding the dynamics of storytelling on social media and the narrative frameworks that provide the generative basis for these stories may also be helpful for devising methods to disrupt their spread.
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Although a great deal of attention has been paid to how conspiracy theories circulate on social media and their factual counterpart conspiracies, there has been little computational work done on describing their narrative structures. We present an automated pipeline for the discovery and description of the generative narrative frameworks of conspiracy theories on social media, and actual conspiracies reported in the news media. We base this work on two separate repositories of posts and news articles describing the well-known conspiracy theory Pizzagate from 2016, and the New Jersey conspiracy Bridgegate from 2013. We formulate a graphical generative machine learning model where nodes represent actors/actants, and multi-edges and self-loops among nodes capture context-specific relationships. Posts and news items are viewed as samples of subgraphs of the hidden narrative network. The problem of reconstructing the underlying structure is posed as a latent model estimation problem. We automatically extract and aggregate the actants and their relationships from the posts and articles. We capture context specific actants and interactant relationships by developing a system of supernodes and subnodes. We use these to construct a network, which constitutes the underlying narrative framework. We show how the Pizzagate framework relies on the conspiracy theorists interpretation of hidden knowledge to link otherwise unlinked domains of human interaction, and hypothesize that this multi-domain focus is an important feature of conspiracy theories. While Pizzagate relies on the alignment of multiple domains, Bridgegate remains firmly rooted in the single domain of New Jersey politics. We hypothesize that the narrative framework of a conspiracy theory might stabilize quickly in contrast to the narrative framework of an actual one, which may develop more slowly as revelations come to light.
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