QAnon founder may have been identified thanks to machine learning

[FancyMancy]

• QAnon founder may have been identified thanks to machine learning
• Who is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints

QAnon founder may have been identified thanks to machine learning
Researchers believe two men were the primary authors of posts attributed to Q.

Cheney Orr / reuters

With help from machine learning software, computer scientists may have unmasked the identity of Q, the founder of the QAnon movement. In a sprawling report published on Saturday, The New York Times shared the findings of two independent teams of forensic linguists who claim they’ve identified Paul Furber, a South African software developer who was one of the first to draw attention to the conspiracy theory, as the original writer behind Q. They say Arizona congressional candidate Ron Watkins

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wgdz/ron-watkins-congressional-campaign-finance-report

also wrote under the pseudonym, first by collaborating with Furber and then later taking over the account when it eventually moved to post on his father’s 8chan message board.

The two teams of Swiss and French researchers used different methodologies to come to the same conclusion. The Swiss one, made up of two researchers from startup OrphAnalytics, used software to break down Q’s missives into patterns of three-character sequences. They then tracked how often those sequences repeated. The French team, meanwhile, trained an AI to look for patterns in Q’s writing. Both techniques broadly fall under an approach known as stylometry

https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6449&context=law_lawreview

that looks to analyze writing in a way that is measurable, consistent and replicable. To avoid the possibility of confusing their respective programs, the teams limited their analysis to social media posts. Among all the other possible authors they put through the test, they say the writing of Furber and Watkins stood out the most for how similar it was that of Q’s, and they’re confident in that identification. The French team made of computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps told The Times their software correctly identified Furber’s writing in 98 percent of tests and Watkins’ in 99 percent. “At first most of the text is by Furber,” said Cafiero. “But the signature of Ron Watkins increased during the first few months as Paul Furber decreased and then dropped completely.”

People have previously used machine learning software

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-computer-program-helped-show-jk-rowling-write-a-cuckoos-calling

to identify Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the secret writer of Cuckoo’s Calling, a 2013 crime fiction novel Rowling wrote under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. More broadly, law enforcement agencies have successfully used stylometry in a variety of criminal cases, including by the FBI to show that Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber.

Experts The Times spoke to – including Professor Patrick Juola, the computer scientist who identified Rowling as the author of Cuckoo’s Calling – told they found the findings credible and persuasive. “What’s really powerful is the fact that both of the two independent analyses showed the same overall pattern,” Juola said.

Both Furber and Watkins deny they wrote any of Q’s messages. “I am not Q,” the latter told The Times. Furber, meanwhile, said he was influenced by Q’s posts to change the style of his prose, a claim linguistic experts told the outlet was “implausible.” Also worth mentioning is the fact the analysis included tweets from Furber that date from the earliest days of Q’s existence.

What happens next is unclear. The researchers who worked on the identification told The Times they hope unmasking Q will loosen QAnon’s hold on people. Spreading like wildfire on social media

https://www.engadget.com/facebook-carols-journey-qanon-reports-005159230.html

, the conspiracy theory has had a profound effect on politics in the US and other parts of the world, and 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.
https://archive.is/gy9Ye



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.

“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.

As the stream of messages, most signed only “Q,” grew into a sprawling conspiracy theory, the mystery surrounding their authorship became a central fascination for its followers — who was the anonymous Q?

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.

The studies provide the first empirical evidence of who invented the toxic QAnon myth, and the scientists who conducted the studies said they hoped that unmasking the creators might weaken its hold over QAnon followers. Some polls

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/qanon-republicans-trump.html

indicate that millions of people still believe that Q is a top military insider whose messages have revealed that former President Trump will save the world from a cabal of “deep state” Democratic paedophiles. QAnon has been linked to scores of violent incidents

https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/qanon-inspired-violence-united-states-empirical-assessment-misunderstood-threat

, many of the attackers who stormed the Capitol last year were adherents, and the F.B.I. has labeled the movement a potential terrorist threat

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/politics/qanon-fbi-violence.html

.

The forensic analyses have not been previously reported. Two prominent experts in such linguistic detective work who reviewed the findings for The Times called the conclusions credible and persuasive.

In a telephone interview from his home near Johannesburg, Mr. Furber, 55, did not dispute that Q’s writing resembled his own. Instead, he claimed that Q’s posts had influenced him so deeply that they altered his prose.

Q’s messages “took over our lives, literally,” Mr. Furber said. “We all started talking like him.”

Linguistic experts said that was implausible, and the scientists who conducted the studies noted that their analyses included tweets by Mr. Furber from the first days Q emerged.

Mr. Watkins, in a telephone interview, said, “I am not Q”, but he also praised the posts. “There is probably more good stuff than bad,” he said, listing as examples “fighting for the safety of the country, and for the safety of the children of the country.” His campaign signs in the Republican primary refer to the online name he uses in QAnon circles, CodeMonkeyZ, and he acknowledged that much of the initial support for his campaign came from the movement. Relying mainly on small donors, Mr. Watkins, 34, trails the primary’s front-runners in fund-raising. (Two other Republicans who have expressed support for QAnon were elected in 2020 — Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado.)
https://archive.is/fuWI2