Two teams of researchers believe they have identified the one who has been hiding for years under the pseudonym of Q and is behind the QAnon theory. Surprise, they would even be two.
What if the founder of the QAnon conspiracy movement, a man named Q, had finally been identified? the New York Times shared the findings of two independent teams of forensic linguists who claim to have identified not one, but two people hiding behind this famous pseudonym. Even more surprisingly, the two teams, which worked with different protocols, identified the same people.
This mysterious Q, whose name would be a reference to the level of secret defense clearance in the United States, appeared for the first time on the Web on October 28, 2017, on the American forum 4chan. In the wake of pizza gatea conspiracy theory targeting Hillary Clinton and according to which there is a pedophilia network in the Democratic camp, these regularly published messages are presented as alerts to an alleged conspiracy organized by the “deep state” against Donald Trump.
It is on these messages that the two teams of scientists worked. The first, from Swiss startup OrphAnalytics, cut messages into three-letter sequences, then analyzed their frequency to compare them to messages posted by six potential authors. The second team, French, relied on artificial intelligence and the machine learning to compare Q’s posts to those of 13 potential authors.
Up to 99% identification confidence
A priori without consulting each other, the two teams first identified Paul Furber, a software developer based in South Africa. He would be the first to have published under the pseudonym of Q. A second author would have gradually taken over, until becoming the only one to use Q’s account after his migration from 4chan to 8kun. It would be the American conspiracy theorist Ron Watkins, son of the founder of 8kun. Very confident, the scientists announce a level of certainty ranging, according to the teams, from 93 to 99% on these identifications. contacted by New York Timesboth men denied their involvement.
It is not the first time that machine learning is used to identify an author. Another famous case dates back to 2013, when JK Rowling, “mother” of the Harry Potter saga, was identified as the secret author of Cuckoo’s Calling, a detective novel written under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. In Q’s case, however, this discovery is more problematic for the authors of the messages, the theories relayed having partly shaped the idea of an election stolen from Donald Trump and led to the events on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.