I am supporting the work of about a half dozen groups studying aspects of QAnon. More groups are welcome. Feel free to reach out. If you study conspiracies, cults, online grifts, ARGs, elections, terrorism, white nationalism, emoji, or even (no joke) mind control, this is a topic you cannot really opt out on, since it creeps daily into the lives of citizens in every democracy. For huge numbers of authentic and inauthentic digital citizens active on social media, QAnon is deeply embedded in their fervent often biblical worldview and daily amplified by clever, distributed, flexible Alternate Reality Game (ARG) mechanics. As Colin points out, there is a lot of mainstream media coverage emerging now. There is a limited but growing scholarly literature. Most focus in the press now is on the anti-democratic (small "d"), pro-Trump, overtly racist, ostensibly dangerous cult like attributes in the US, though it is multilingual and documented in more than 70 countries. Fewer articles describe it as a game. In my view, it started as a small grift to sell t-shirts on Amazon where you can now purchase all sorts of QAnon "chum" for Trump or #savethechildren rallies. The grift is a growing business and the online game play is fully on display in the offline streets. It evolved quickly into a massive multiplayer ARG and now threatens national security in the name of stopping pedophilia and satanic worship. QAnon blends real world tragedies (like Epstein) with unlimited online narrative storylines created by the various players. The game reward system consists of amplification measures (ex., RTs, shares, replies, and likes) and of course the gold standard when you get Presidential of General Flynn retweets. It first stood out to me when I saw the presence of themes like WWG1WGA, General Flynn, "The Great Awakening" and QAnon in the Twitter user bios fall 2019 while studying the Canadian election. Accounts purporting to be in the USA were churning out huge amounts of misinformation and propaganda about Justin Trudeau, promoting a far right fringe candidate, as well as a bizarre constellation of non-Canadian issues. There were anomalous features throughout the data, including, but not limited to, accounts with affinities for sharing known Russian propaganda news sites, super influencer status accounts, trolls and bots, and networks of radically homogeneous followers. The US flags and Flynn three star emojis, among many other symbols, were buttressing an emoji-laden hashtag-driven crusade enabled by recommender algorithms. They still are. Now we have the OAN network inside White House press briefings teeing up Russia-friendly questions for the most pro-authoritarian President in my lifetime. I want to write that you cannot make this all up, but they did, so you sort of have to write it. I want to believe this cannot be as vast as it seems, but the group is growing fast with super-devoted adherents and it is labeled a terrorist threat by the FBI for a reason. In terms of what to read first, may I suggest: https://ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-security-threat-in-the-ma... https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/26/1005609/qanon-facebook-twitter-y... https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/07/23/jack-posobiec-interviewed-pro... https://www.wired.com/story/the-weird-dark-history-8chan/ https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q... https://www.businessinsider.com/who-owns-8chan-jim-watkins-life-2019-8 If the thing that really caught your attention is "mind control" watch this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Eu0puplTFo&feature=youtu.be ~Stu On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 5:55 AM Alexandra Florea <xandra.florea@gmail.com> wrote:

Prof. Stuart Shulman is working with qanon data, as per an email sent to this list a few weeks back. I'll forward it to you.

On Mon 17. Aug 2020 at 06:30, raincoaster <raincoaster@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hello AOIR'rs,

I'm a cybersecurity journalist coming back from a 4 year health-related

hiatus. I need to get up to speed on the whole QAnon conspiracy pretty

quickly for a couple of projects, and am more out of the loop than I

thought. If anyone has any pointers to primary and secondary sources

relating to QAnon, I'd really appreciate it. My background is the opposite

side of the coin: hacktivism with a focus on Anonymous. Starting from

scratch here, so all suggestions are appreciated, particularly since half

the accounts seem to be banned from Twitter and the other half blocked me

ten years ago.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

Lorraine Murphy

--

The Cryptosphere <http://thecryptosphere.com>: short and sweet cyber and

crypto for the whole family!

raincoaster <http://raincoaster.com>: 49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees

attitude!

raincoaster media <http://raincoastermedia.com>: transformative social

media training

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