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Waiting for Q: An Exploration of QAnon Users' Online Migration to Poal in the Wake of Voat's Demise

Antonis Papasavva, Enrico Mariconti

Many controversial and hateful online communities on mainstream social networks get banned due to moderation efforts. One of the platforms known to have taken such measures is Reddit, which banned various communities and users in recent years. Although banning these communities eliminates the problem on one platform, the participants of those communities often tend to regroup on other, laxer alternative social networks. One alternative to Reddit was Voat, a Reddit-like social network that allowed its users to share their controversial ideas freely. Voat bloomed and became more popular with every Reddit ban, and although it had a troubled history, it managed to stay afloat for four years before shutting down in December 2020. In this work, we investigate the Voat shutdown and how the users of the conspiracy theory QAnon organized their online migration. We find that many users proposed Poal as a Voat alternative, resulting in about half of the QAnon user base of Voat migrating there. In addition, we find that only a few Voat users lost hope close to the end of Voat, turning against Q, while others encouraged their fellow conspiracy adherents to "wait for Q" to tell them where to go. Lastly, we find evidence that shortly after the Voat shutdown, users on Poal (most of them Voat migrants) start discussing and planning the January 6th, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01397

**Waiting for Q: An Exploration of QAnon Users' Online Migration to Poal in the Wake of Voat's Demise** *Antonis Papasavva, Enrico Mariconti* Many controversial and hateful online communities on mainstream social networks get banned due to moderation efforts. One of the platforms known to have taken such measures is Reddit, which banned various communities and users in recent years. Although banning these communities eliminates the problem on one platform, the participants of those communities often tend to regroup on other, laxer alternative social networks. One alternative to Reddit was Voat, a Reddit-like social network that allowed its users to share their controversial ideas freely. Voat bloomed and became more popular with every Reddit ban, and although it had a troubled history, it managed to stay afloat for four years before shutting down in December 2020. In this work, we investigate the Voat shutdown and how the users of the conspiracy theory QAnon organized their online migration. We find that many users proposed Poal as a Voat alternative, resulting in about half of the QAnon user base of Voat migrating there. In addition, we find that only a few Voat users lost hope close to the end of Voat, turning against Q, while others encouraged their fellow conspiracy adherents to "wait for Q" to tell them where to go. Lastly, we find evidence that shortly after the Voat shutdown, users on Poal (most of them Voat migrants) start discussing and planning the January 6th, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01397

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[–] • 3 pts (edited )

From the paper - i shit you not - They simply cross referenced user profile names that were identical across the three different social media sites (reddit/ Voat/ Poal) and concluded that they are the same individual. Nothing more nothing less.

EDIT -'For this analysis, we plot the case insensitive, identical username intersection Venn diagram in Figure 3. We note that we only focus on identical usernames among Reddit, Voat, and Poal to measure the number of users that created an account, or started being active on Poal, shortly after the Voat shutdown announcement. To protect the anonymity of users, we encrypt all usernames across all three platforms using the hash function SHA256. 7 This guarantees that we do not track usernames across platforms but rather demonstrate the existence of identical usernames across them. Overall, we find 108 usernames that are exactly the same across all three platforms. Also, Reddit and Voat share 1.3𝐾 usernames (9.7% of Voat QAnon engaging users), while Voat and Poal share 862 usernames (43.3% of Poal QAnon engaging users). '

[–] • 0 pt

Mhmmm, They made a custom scraper and accessed data over multiple months in 2021, probably very gradually so as to not alert @AOU

[–] • 4 pts

Unless i missed it - which is likely, it used several time periods for different analysis - ie, 5 days before the voat shut till 5 days after wards and in another a period of 4 days around the voat shut down announcement - i cant be assed re-skimming it all (bc ultimately it's verbal data bullshittery) but i'm inclined to believe the cross refencing was only over a period of 'days' rather than long term. In conclusion - the entire paper reeks of 'lets just find some data to support out preconceived assumptions' it's neither thorough, exhausting, accurate or wholly conclusive.

[–] • 1 pt

Yeah it was in the paper, what I'm curious about is how they were able to correllate names with comments/posts without an account. When I joined names were redacted unless logged in. I'm assuming this was a recent change? @AOU

>Poal

>Since there is no previous research on Poal or publicly available datasets, we implement a custom crawler to collect Poal data. To this end, we followed the methodology in [34] and implemented a DOM-tree scraper using HTTP requests and Beautiful Soup to visit Poal subverses and collect data. Our online scraper operated between July 1, 2021, and September 7, 2021. Poal shows submissions and comments made on its platform without the need for registration. Therefore, our scraper could go back to the beginning of every subverse and collect data from then on. To guarantee our dataset’s completeness, our scraper was following a list of subverses that it had to collect, and it would go through the entire history of every subverse on that list in a loop, after the list of subverses was exhausted, repeating this process constantly, until the last day of collection, September 7, 2021. This way, our scraper visited submissions that it had already collected, looking for new comments, if any.

[–] • 0 pt

I guess calling Qtards, tards in their own house, consistently, makes me a Qtard.

[–] • 1 pt

LOl, in that case we are all Q-tards then ...