“Open your eyes,” recommended the post. “Many people in our government worship Satan.” Published in October 2017 on a free discussion forum, this notice was the starting point for the movement now known as QAnon. Paul Furber was its first apostle.
The bizarre claim made all the sense in the world to this South African software developer and tech journalist, who has been fascinated by American politics and conspiracy theories for years, he said in an interview.
Furber still promoted the so-called “Pizzagate” – the disproved idea that liberal Satanists were trafficking children from a pizzeria in Washington. He was also one of the few who understood an obscure reference made in the message to so-called Operation Mockingbird, an alleged CIA scheme to manipulate the press.
The stream of messages, most signed simply with “Q”, was becoming a great conspiracy theory. At the same time, the mystery surrounding its authorship began to fascinate his followers. Who would be anonymous Q?
Two teams of forensic linguists now say their analyzes of Q’s texts indicate that Furber, one of the first online commentators to draw attention to the initial messages, was actually the main author.
Investigators looking for the author have paid less attention to Furber, instead focusing their speculations on another figure driving QAnon: Ron Watkins, who operated a website on which messages began appearing in 2018 and is now a candidate for congressman in Arizona. And scientists say they have found evidence to support those suspicions as well.
Watkins appears to have taken over from Furber as of early 2018. Both deny writing Q’s texts.
The studies bring the first empirical evidence of who invented the toxic myth of QAnon, and the researchers hope the debunking could weaken the fascination the theory holds for its followers.
Some polls indicate that millions of people still believe Q is a high-ranking military man whose messages revealed that former President Donald Trump will save the world from a cabal of so-called “deep state” Democratic pedophiles. Dozens of violent incidents have been linked to QAnon, many of the Capitol’s invaders were followers of the theory, and the FBI classified the move as a potential terrorist threat.
The forensic analysis had not been reported until now. Two leading linguistic research experts reviewed the findings of the analyzes for the New York Times and described them as persuasive and credible.
In an interview from his home near Johannesburg, Furber, 55, did not deny that Q’s writing style resembles his own. He claimed instead that the posts influenced him so deeply that they altered his own prose. “Messaging has literally taken over our lives,” he said. “We all started talking like him.”
Linguistic experts say this is implausible, and the researchers who did the studies noted that their analyzes included tweets by Furber from the earliest days of Q’s emergence.
Watkins says, “I’m not Q.” But he praises the posts. “There’s more good content there than bad, fighting for the safety of the country and the safety of children.”
His campaign posters in the Republican primary allude to the name he uses online in QAnon circles, CodeMonkeyZ, and he admitted that much of the initial support for his campaign came from the movement. Heavily reliant on small donors, Watkins, 34, is losing out on fundraisers for the top runners in the primaries.
Two other Republicans who have voiced support for QAnon, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, were elected representatives in 2020.
One of the analyzes was done by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz, from the Swiss startup OrphAnalytics, and the other by French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps. Both were based on widely recognized forms of forensic linguistics, which detect particular variations that reveal the same authorship in two different texts. For example, in the writing of the Federalist Papers, James Madison often used “whilst” instead of “while” (both mean “while”), while Alexander Hamilton tended to write “upon” instead of “on” (“on”). .
Rather than relying on expert opinion, the studies used a mathematical approach known as stylometry. Sophisticated software decomposed Q texts into patterns of three-character strings and tracked the recurrence of every possible combination.
The technique does not highlight memorable and idiosyncratic words, as forensic linguists often did. But proponents of stylometry point out that they can quantify its error rate.
The Swiss team said its accuracy rate was 93%; the Frenchwoman said her software correctly identified Watkins in 99% of tests and Furber in 98%.
Machine learning revealed that Harry Potter creator JK Rowling had written 2013’s “The Cuckoo’s Calling” under a literary pseudonym. The FBI used a form of stylometry to identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber. Techniques of this kind have helped detectives in the US and UK solve homicide cases that involved suicide letters and falsified text messages.
The teams that studied Q got in touch after the Swiss released a preliminary study showing that Q’s writing style had changed over time.
They applied different techniques. The Swiss used software to measure similarities in three-character patterns across multiple texts and at the same time compare the complexity of vocabulary and syntax. The French, a form of artificial intelligence that learns an author’s writing patterns, much like facial recognition software identifies human facial features.
The two teams shared text samples, including more than 100,000 words from Q and at least 12,000 words from each of the other 13 authors they analyzed.
Gerald McMenamin, of the University of Nevada at Reno and a renowned forensic linguist, says he doubts the software can identify the telltale individual variations amid the peculiarities of the distinctive voice used in Q’s messages, replete with short sentences, cryptic statements, military jargon and Socratic questions.
The scientists said that to avoid the danger that texts covering different forms or genres could confuse the software, they compared other samples of texts that were all of the same type: social media posts, mainly tweets. And the texts by Furber and Watkins stood out from all others in their similarity to those of Q.
David Hoover, a professor of English at New York University, says the scientists appear to have successfully resolved the potential problem of Q’s particular voice and calls the studies “very persuasive.”
“It’s credible,” says mathematician Patrick Juola of Duquesne University, who identified Rowling as the author of “The Cuckoo’s Call.” “It is very convincing that the two independent analyzes indicate the same general pattern.”
Neither team ruled out the possibility that other authors contributed to Q’s thousands of messages, especially during what appears to have been a period of collaboration between Furber and Watkins around the end of 2017. But the researchers relied on other facts. to limit the list of likely authors to test. The evidence, they said, raised confidence that they had unmasked the main perpetrators.
Some QAnon followers began to suspect as early as mid-2018 that one or more of the commenters who first claimed to have stumbled upon Q’s messages were actually the authors.
Without prior knowledge, how could anyone have plucked those near-absurd posts from the online flood? An NBC report in the summer of that year identified Q’s first praisers as Furber (known online as Baruch the Scribe, or Baruch scribe) and three other people. The report highlighted that they had possible financial motivations to fuel the craze, as they had asked for donations for alleged Q research (Furber did not).
The Swiss team studied texts from the four people and also from Watkins and his father. In addition to examining these six potential authors, the French added seven others to the list: They tested tweets from another online Q proponent linked to Watkins and from Donald Trump, his wife Melania, their son Eric and three people close to the former president who had QAnon: former security adviser Michael Flynn, political adviser Roger Stone and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.
“Initially most of the texts are by Furber”, says Cafiero. “But Ron Watkins’ signature grew over the first few months as Furber’s waned and then stopped altogether.”
Q is silent, not posting a message since December 2020.
Furber said that in his view QAnon is “an operation that has had enough.” He said he is still convinced that it was orchestrated by a real insider “to wake people up to this immense secret war against the cabal” and that “the next phase is coming.”
In an online memoir, he writes wistfully about the movement’s beginnings, before he was “kidnapped.” He says Q’s messages appeared to validate conspiracy theories he had subscribed to for years, tying the Clintons and George Soros to the Rothschilds and the Illuminati.
“As a child who is first taken to his father’s workshop,” he writes, “we were offered a behind-the-scenes look at the repulsive and corrupt world of geopolitics.”
