QAnon, a far-right global conspiracy theory is one of the weirdest stories the internet (or 4chan/8chan/8kun in particular) has brought about. You're probably heard enough about the insane stories and its crazy supporters, so I won't go into any details here. What I'm interested in is what many of us would like to know: Who is Q? Is it one person or many? Is it a delusional psychopath or someone staging the biggest scam in the history of the internet? Is it an ARG? Or is it all made up by the a US pig farmer who lives in the Philippines, called Jim Watkins? Does the NSA know who he is?

What we know:

  • Q posts on 8kun and identifies using a tripcode system.
  • 8kun's admin is Ron Watkins, Jim Watkins' son.
  • All posts are gathered on an aggregator called Qmap dot pub, which is tied to Watkins and is now offline.

Someone scraped all of Q's posts from Qmap days before it was taken offline. The entire dataset is provided here for anyone to download and to play with. What follows is a basic and preliminary analysis of the aggregated posts of Q.

Parse data

The dataset

This is what the data set looks like:

Unnamed: 0 id tripcode t title text minute hour month year
0 0 950 !UW.yye1fxo 2018-03-15 23:44:40 Trust Mike Pompeo (Kansas) \n\n Anonymous\nThu Mar 15 2018 23:43:08 GMT+0... 44 23 3 2018
1 1 3298 !!mG7VJxZNCI 2019-03-28 21:02:23 LOVE OF COUNTRY! #FLAGSOUT https://twitter.com/tysoneberly/status/1111370... 2 21 3 2019
2 2 553 !UW.yye1fxo 2018-01-19 05:04:38 Military Intel & State Secrets The TELL.How can we listen in, track, and moni... 4 5 1 2018
3 3 3714 !!Hs1Jq13jV6 2019-12-17 21:23:02 Flynn FISA Was Illegal and Manipulated by the FBI https://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/fi... 23 21 12 2019
4 4 3108 !!mG7VJxZNCI 2019-03-18 02:42:20 Patriots in Control of Twitter? \nHello, Jack.png\n 42 2 3 2019
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
8956 8956 2119 !!mG7VJxZNCI 2018-09-08 18:33:44 Home of The Brave There was a time when our children stood at at... 33 18 9 2018
8957 8957 2862 !!mG7VJxZNCI 2019-02-22 16:04:36 Accurate Memes of Bill and Loretta's Infamous ... \nD0BB65WWwAEC8wP.jpg\nD0BJNbMX4AEiDfk.jpg\nD0... 4 16 2 2019
8958 8958 502 !UW.yye1fxo 2018-01-08 03:44:09 DEFCON 1 Stringer/Marker Original [15] minDEFCON [1] CONF Revised [1] m... 44 3 1 2018
8959 8959 2768 !!mG7VJxZNCI 2019-02-17 22:04:54 Jussie Smollett False Flag Linked to Sen. Kama... \nDzlpRPbVsAEYuyS.jpg-large.jpg\n 4 22 2 2019
8960 8960 318 !ITPb.qbhqo 2017-12-09 19:01:00 Chester Bennington and Chris Cornell \n\n Anonymous\nSat Dec 09 2017 18:55:39 GMT+0... 1 19 12 2017

8961 rows × 10 columns

Analysis

These are the tripcodes that Q has used in the past:

!UW.yye1fxo !!mG7VJxZNCI !!Hs1Jq13jV6 !4pRcUA0lBE !xowAT4Z3VQ !CbboFOtcZs !ITPb.qbhqo !A6yxsPKia. !2jsTvXXmXs

Q has been getting lazy

At what time of the day does Q post?