Two teams of researchers, one Swiss and the other French, claim to have identified, thanks to stylometry, two men, the South African Paul Furber and the American Ron Watkins, as being at the origin of the conspiracy theory QAnon.
“Open your eyes, many in our government worship Satan.” This message posted online in October 2017 was “the very first message of the conspiracy movement QAnon”, remind him New York Times. And South African developer and tech journalist Paul Furber may have been the very first proponent.
While the thousands of messages posted over the years by a mysterious messenger signing with the letter Q turned into a real conspiracy theory, a thick mystery still surrounded its creator or creators.
Loosen the grip of QAnon
From now on, two teams of experts in linguistics have just “provide the first piece of empirical evidence on the identity of the people behind the toxic myth of QAnon”. It would therefore be the South African Paul Furber and the American Ron Watkins. The latter seems to have taken over from Paul Furber and “is now a Republican primary candidate for Arizona’s congressional seat in Washington”, highlights the daily.
Scientists hope that unmasking the creators of QAno will allow “loosen the grip of this conspiracy theory on its many followers”. Millions of people still believe that the mysterious Q “is a high-ranking soldier who would have dared to reveal that Donald Trump was going to save the world from a cabal hatched by pedophile Democrats”, explains the newspaper.
Stylometry to the rescue
The two teams of Swiss and French researchers used stylometry, a field of linguistics that uses statistics to describe the stylistic properties of a text. They first used software to split Q’s messages into three-character sequences. The Swiss team, made up of two researchers from the start-up OrphAnalytics, Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz, then analyzed the repetition of these sequences in different texts.
The French team, trained by the research engineer at CNRS Florian Cafiero and lecturer in computational philology at the École des Chartes Jean-Baptiste Camps, meanwhile, developed an artificial intelligence model to search for particular patterns in Q’s writing.
And both teams of experts came to the same conclusion regarding Paul Furber and Ron Watkins.
The two incriminated men, joined by the New York Times, deny being the authors of the messages. As for the mysterious Q, it is today walled in silence “and hasn’t posted a message since December 2020”, reminiscent of everyday life.
