QAnon's posts were written by TWO authors over different points in time, claims analysis by Swiss company
A Swiss company called OrphAnalytics analyzed QAnon's 4,952 messages, and it found two distinct styles, revealing they were probably written by two different authors. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that purports that America is supposedly run by a cabal of pedophiles and Satan-worshippers who run a global child sex-trafficking operation. It also posits that President Donald Trump is the only person who can stop them.
“Built around genomics”, the OrphAnalytics SA claims that it brings the “solution of text authentication capable of detecting ghostwriting issues. The developed solution is designed to identify the author of a text by comparing its style with other authors’ writings; only a few pages are necessary”. OrphAnalytics’ software, it claims, adapts itself to common languages in the professional world. “They are now used to authenticate different types of documents. For instance, our software programs were used recently to expose the mechanism of a contractual fraud to an arbitral court,” says the website.
The report titled, ‘Style analysis by machine learning reveals that two authors likely shared the writing of QAnon's messages at two different periods in time’, says that between October 28, 2017, and November 13, 2020, 4952 anonymous messages, signed Q, were published first on the 4chan site and then on the 8chan site, which recently became 8kun. This corpus of messages is designated QAnon, for their Q-signature letter and their anonymous character.
“For the QAnon movement surrounding this corpus, the signatory is a U.S. official who would have a Q clearance giving him access to confidential information and this official would anonymously publish the information intended to prepare the population for important political changes,” the report read. "Our results very strongly suggest the existence of two different authors behind Q," said Claude Alain Roten, OrphAnalytics' CEO, and co-founder in a statement to the press. "Moreover, these distinct signatures clearly correspond to separate periods in time and different online forums."
Roten, a former geneticist trained at Harvard and the University of Lausanne, based this conclusion on algorithmic analyses. The company’s method compares frequencies of character patterns to bring out individual signatures, regardless of the text meaning. The experts at the organization supposedly cleaned the 4952 messages from any content deprived of individual syntax: lists, greetings, quotes from personalities, and messages shorter than 50 characters. Then, they fed the resulting elements to their software.
The analysis found that the first period of Q messages — October 28, 2017, to December 1, 2017 — bears a distinct individual signature from the rest. After that, the analyses inferred that another author took over QAnon on another forum, named 8chan. The second period — December 1 2017 to November 13, 2020 — supposedly shows a single signature with a slight evolution over time.
"The next step is to contribute putting a name on QAnon by comparing these signatures to those of the usual suspects," said Roten. "To do that, we gather and cure written material from these persons to compare it with Q messages." Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to condemn QAnon. The FBI has also labeled QAnon a domestic terrorist threat.