Computer scientists, with the help of machine learning software, may have uncovered the identity of Q, the founder of the QAnon movement. In a wide-ranging report on Saturday, The New York Times says Paul Furber, a South African software developer who was one of the first to draw attention to the QAnon conspiracy theory, was the first author behind Q.’s messages. The Times bases this on the findings of two independent teams of forensic linguists.
Two teams of Swiss and French researchers came to the same conclusion, but used different methodologies. The Swiss group of two researchers from OrphAnalytics used software to split Q’s messages into patterns of three-character strings. They then tracked how often these sequences were repeated. Meanwhile, the French team trained an AI to look for patterns in Q’s writing. Both techniques generally fall within the scope of an approach known as stylometry, which seeks to analyze writing in a measurable, consistent and repeatable way. The teams limited their analysis to social media posts so as not to confuse their own schedules. Of all the other possible authors they tested, they agreed on how similar the writings of Paul Furber and Ron Watkins were to Q’s. Ron Watkins is an American conspiracy theorist and best known as the administrator of the website 8kun.
And they’re pretty confident in their findings… The French team of computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps told The Times that their software used Furber’s writing on 98 percent of the tests and Watkins’s on 99 percent. He said he described his writing correctly. “At first, most of the text was by Furber,” Cafiero said.
Machine learning software has previously been used to identify Harry Potter author JK Rowling as the secret author of Cuckoo’s Calling, a 2013 crime fiction novel written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. More broadly, law enforcement has successfully used stylometry in a variety of criminal cases, including one by the FBI to show that Ted Kaczynski is the Unabomber.
Experts spoke with The Times, including computer scientist Professor Patrick Juola, who identified Rowling as the author of Cuckoo’s Calling, said they found the findings credible and convincing. “What’s really powerful is that two independent analyzes both show the same overall pattern,” says Juola.
Furber and Watkins deny having written any of Q’s messages. “I’m not a Q,” Watkins told The Times. Furber said he changed his style because of Q’s writings, but linguists speaking to the news source say this claim is “unreasonable”. It may also be worth noting that the analysis also includes tweets from Furber’s early days of Q’s existence.
What will happen now is uncertain. Researchers working on the identification tell The Times that they hope unmasking the Q will loosen QAnon’s influence on humans. The conspiracy theory that spread like wildfire on social media has had a profound impact on politics in the US and other parts of the world. While Q hasn’t posted a new message since the end of 2020, that hasn’t dampened people’s enthusiasm for conspiracies about the “deep state” and its involvement in their lives.
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