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dalton99a

(81,516 posts) Sat Feb 19, 2022, 04:43 PM Feb 2022

Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/19/technology/qanon-messages-authors.html

Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
Using machine learning, separate teams of computer scientists identified the same two men as likely authors of messages that fueled the viral movement.
By David D. Kirkpatrick
Feb. 19, 2022 Updated 1:40 p.m. ET

“Open your eyes,” the online post began, claiming, “Many in our govt worship Satan.”

That warning, published on a freewheeling online message board in October 2017, was the beginning of the movement now known as QAnon. Paul Furber was its first apostle.

The outlandish claim made perfect sense to Mr. Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist long fascinated with American politics and conspiracy theories, he said in an interview. He still clung to “Pizzagate,” the debunked online lie that liberal Satanists were trafficking children from a Washington restaurant. He was also among the few who understood an obscure reference in the message to “Operation Mockingbird,” an alleged C.I.A. scheme to manipulate the news media.

Now two teams of forensic linguists say their analysis of the Q texts shows that Mr. Furber, one of the first online commentators to call attention to the earliest messages, actually played the lead role in writing them.

Sleuths hunting for the writer behind Q have increasingly overlooked Mr. Furber and focused their speculation on another QAnon booster: Ron Watkins, who operated a website where the Q messages began appearing in 2018 and is now running for Congress in Arizona. And the scientists say they found evidence to back up those suspicions as well. Mr. Watkins appears to have taken over from Mr. Furber at the beginning of 2018. Both deny writing as Q.