Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints

The online post claimed that many in the government worship Satan.

That warning was published on a freewheeling online message board in October of last year. The first apostle was Paul Furber.

The claim made perfect sense to Mr. Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist who has been fascinated with American politics and conspiracy theories. He still believed thePizzagate lie that liberal Satanists were selling children from a Washington restaurant. He was one of the few who understood an obscure reference to an alleged C.I.A. scheme to manipulate the news media.

As the stream of messages grew into a conspiracy theory, the mystery surrounding their authorship became a central fascination for its followers.

The 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 have been looking for the writer behind Q, but have overlooked Mr. Furber and focused their attention on another person: Ron Watkins, who is running for Congress in Arizona. Scientists say they found evidence to back up their suspicions. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Watkins appears to have taken over from Mr. Furber. Both deny that they wrote as Q.

The scientists who conducted the studies said they hoped that exposing the creators of the myth would weaken its hold on its followers. According to some polls, millions of people still believe that Q is a military leader who will save the world from a group of pedophiles. The movement has been linked to scores of violent incidents, and the F.B.I. has labeled it a potential terrorist threat.

The analyses have not been reported before. The conclusions of the linguistic detective work were reviewed by two prominent experts.

Mr. Furber said in the interview that Q's writing resembled his own. He claimed that Q's posts had influenced him so much that they altered his prose.

Mr. Furber said that Q's messages took over their lives.

The scientists who conducted the studies noted that their analyses included Mr. Furber's first days on the internet.

Mr. Watkins said in a telephone interview that he was not Q.

He said that there is more good stuff than bad, and that it was important to fight for the safety of the country. Mr. Watkins relies mainly on small donors. Two other Republicans who supported Qanon were elected in 2000.

The two analyses are built on long-established forms and were done by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of OrphAnalytics. James Madison favored whilst over Alexander Hamilton in the writing of the Federalist Papers.

The computer scientists used a mathematical approach instead of relying on expert opinion. The new form of science yielded results that were measurable, consistent and replicable, according to practitioners.

The Q texts were broken down into three-character sequence and tracked the recurrence of each combination.

Their technique doesn't highlight the way forensic linguists used to do it. The advocates of stylometry say they can quantify their software's error rate.

The Swiss team said it had an accuracy rate of 93 percent. Mr. Watkins and Mr. Furber were identified by the French software in 98 percent of the tests.

J.K. Rowling had written a mystery under a different name. The F.B.I. used a method called stylometry to show that Ted Kaczynski was the bomber. In recent years, such techniques have helped solve murder cases in the United States and Britain.

The teams studying Q got in touch with each other after the Swiss scientists showed that the writing had changed over time. Different techniques were applied by each team. The Swiss scientists used software to measure similarities in the three-character patterns across multiple texts. The French team used a form of artificial intelligence that learns the patterns of an author's writing in the same way that facial-recognition software learns human features.

Each of the 13 other writers they analyzed had at least 12,000 words in their text samples.

The University of Nevada, Reno's renowned forensic linguist, Gerald McMenamin, doubted that software could pick out the telltale individual variations from the quirks of the distinctive voice assumed in the Q messages.

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The scientists compared other writing samples that were all of the same type to make sure they didn't confuse the software. The writings by Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins were very similar to Q.

David Hoover, an English professor at New York University and an expert in author identification, said the scientists seemed to effectively address the potential problem of Q's distinctive voice. He said the work was quite persuasive.

Patrick Juola, a mathematician who identified Ms. Rowling as the author, said he would buy it.

Both of the two independent analyses showed the same pattern.

The possibility of other writers contributing to Q's thousands of messages was ruled out by both teams.

The scientists used other facts to narrow the list of feasible writers. The scientists said that the evidence increased their confidence that they had identified the main authors.

Some of the commentators who claimed to have stumbled onto the Q messages had actually written them. Without prior knowledge, how could anyone have taken those posts out of the torrent? Mr. Furber and three others were identified in an NBC news report. The report said that the three others had financial motives for stoking the craze because they had solicited donations.

The Swiss team studied the writings of those four as well as that of Mr. Watkins and his father.

The French scientists added seven more potential authors to the mix. The Watkinses, Mr. Trump, his wife, Eric, and three others close to the former president who had publicly encouraged Qnon were tested.

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Most of the text is written by Furber, according to Mr. Cafiero, who works at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Mr. Furber said in an interview that he had a passion for American politics from his parents, who had taught in Canada and traveled around the United States. He was building a career in software development and writing for publications.

Questions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy began his fascination with conspiracy theories. He found a site spinning alternative stories about the suicide of the Clinton White House counsel and other deaths connected to the Clintons.

The scientists say the early Q messages are similar to Mr. Furber's writing. Mr. Furber and a few others helped attract the attention of entrepreneurial creators who amplified the messages.

Both studies found that the writing changed at the beginning of the year. The posts of the year were filled with Socratic questions, but the later ones were more descriptive and written in all capital letters. Sometimes, Q shared something on the internet.

The site known as 8chan was owned by Jim Watkins and his son, Ron Watkins, and the Q messages had recently jumped from an older message board to the one run by Ron Watkins. Jim Watkins, a former U.S. Army helicopter repairman who had settled in the Philippines, also owned pig and honey farms. He created a pro-Trump website with his son around the time of the election.

There was a change in writing style at the start of the year, and an exchange between the Q account and Ron Watkins. The person writing as Q asked Mr. Watkins if the messages were still coming from the original Q.

Mr. Furber said that Q had been hijacked and that Mr. Watkins was involved.

The scientists said the messages were very similar to the writing of Ron Watkins.

Fredrick Brennan, who started the message board that the Watkinses now own, claimed without proof that Q was the invention of Mr. Furber. In the documentary Q: Into the Storm, Ron Watkins seemed to admit that he had written as Q.

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Q hasn't posted a message since December 2020.

Mr. Furber believed that the operation had run its course and that it was orchestrated by a true insider to awaken people.

He wrote about the early days of the QAnon movement in an online memoir, saying that Q's messages seemed to confirm conspiracy theories he had been subscribed to for years.

We were being given a behind-the-scenes look into the ugly and corrupt world, like a child being taken around his father's workshop for the first time.