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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

(post is archived)

[–] 3 pts
[–] 2 pts

Yeah, not downloading a Pdf.

[–] 1 pt

Yeah, not downloading a Pdf.

I don't blame you. I didn't download it either, but you were asking to see more information.

[–] 2 pts (edited )

I just Read it, it doesn't actually show any evidence for organizing of jan 6. Except conflating that when Voat shut down users calling for 'a massive protest' 'rally' and 'd day' with (from the paper) - 'More specifically, Q, for a long time, was calling adherents to arms, talking about usurpation and insurrection [33]. Therefore, when Trump asked his supporters to join him at the US Capitol on January 6, QAnon adherents, as expected, interpreted this invitation as the promised insurrection Q preached.' - That in a nutshell is the entire 'organizing online' for the jan 6 insurrection.

Complete gaslighting garbage.

[–] 0 pt

My question; how would they know who went where? Trolling? IPS tracking? Im not tech savey.

[–] 3 pts

tracking cookies. isp info. dns requests...

[–] 1 pt

so spying

[–] 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

[–] 0 pt

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