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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)

[–] 0 pt

I'll give these faggots a people's history of Q that they wont hear from the glowies and retards.

It's 2015, rumors are that donald trump is going to run for office and is genuinely taking it seriously, people find this funny initially. In a few months his campaigned has changed minds all over 4chan just by his public statements and some private testimonies of people who know him/work for him being shared online. Just about the time the first major poll comes out and shows he stands a chance in the primaries someone with access to a platinum card with the last name trump and an executive office in trump towers posts on 4chan's /pol/ to engage with users, saying they are in their father's campaign meetings and want to court favor with /pol/ since they pretty organically supported him from the start even if just for a laugh. Ideas are shared and he is warned to use an alias and set up a tripcode for security so CNN doesn't try to dox him or nuke his father's campaign with accusations of being a /pol/ock or make ugly/inaccurate associations of endorsement of 4chan culture.

From then on we get a regular series of check-ins from a trump campaign insider, with mostly accurate inside ball and we gave him feedback, this insider called himself "Q"

When trump won the primaries Q dropped by to say goodbye and thanks and that the campaign would restructure for the big leagues and that he was unlikely to keep his position in the room. He asked for continued support for Trump's campaign. This original Q had one consistent tripcode he used on 4chan and expected that it would eventually be cracked and users who had seen a rah of pretenders in the last few months expected more pretenders would appear. It is at thus point you should research tripcodes, think of it as a pseudo password which is encrypted and converted to an alphanumeric displayed behind a chosen name, on 4chan name fagging is rare and trip fagging is even rarer but it was tolerated in this context, anong the reasons it was always loathed is because of what ultimately happens, somebody will brute force the code and begin impersonating the original or people will be too stupid to recognize imposters with bad tripcodes.

The Qanon people know now was an impersonator of the original Q. 4chan was not fertile soil for this endeavor because enough users called out the bad tripcode so they migrated to the original 8chan, now 8kun. They started their own board and spread their deluded horseshit across facebook and any rightwing adjacent community for years.

8chan's Q had a special tripcode, likely only an admin would have been able to create and jim the owner was a "former" contractor for the CIA its important to know the CIA had completely taken over anonymous by about 2014 and that the CIA enlisted 4chan and later 8chan in the arab spring and maidan revolution. A huge cross section of the CIA was working to control and steer web culture and influence digital activism for their objectives, they had a working model and followed it with Q.

Q was probably Eric Trump, the big imposter Q was probably a multi person operation where CIA handed orders to 8chan's owner who wrote up wacky shit in his unique style and his son posted it and kept logs/feedback.

Various spooks spread the Q hoax around and maintained it through censoring dissent and eventually using mostly a network of sock accounts propped it up on the original voat. It was obvious from about the year 2017 that the goal of Qanon was to manufacture an elaborate loss and embarrassment for Trump in which his supporters, Qtards and himself would be highly demoralized and likely socially castigated by a national happening born from the Q manipulation, for this to work trump had to be misinformed about all this Q paraphernalia people wore at his rallies and its likely that his son in law and CIA handlers were gaslighting him about this Q phenomena, we even saw Sean Hannity wearing a Q button making allusions to releasing the Qtard holy grail of declassifying important documents and subpoenas.

At this point its worth mentioning that anyone reading this should have some level of understanding of "active measures"

Part of the Q conspiracy was slinging mud on good citizen journalism a separate 8chan board dedicated to perusing leaked emails of clinton staffer john podesta led down a rabbit hole of obvious child sex trafficking and demoniac ritual sex and cannibalism this broadly settled under the name pizzagate and the pizzagate board on 8chan did great detective work which was constantly undermined by the Q community pretending it was their research and half-assing its explanation or fabricating things. This of course was all a CIA/deepstate cover operation, active measures taken to suppress the information by making truth dubious by engineered association to such idiocy, the most common squash tactic the CIA has ever used, the term conspiracy theory was invented by them for just that purpose after the assassination of JFK which newly published government documents prove they did, or how they push flat earth pseudo science specifically in rightwing or conspiracy communities. A favorite example of mine was when clinton was under investigation for the lewinsky scandal almost none of the low end rags and magazines ran the story, most print media ran cover, highly esteemed papers tried to redefine the words lie and sex while anything at the checkout line in a convenience store was running stories like aliens spotted over midwest, mermaid ate my dog, bigfoot and dracula have cute baby. Obvious attempt at oversaturating public discourse with nonsense so people would lose trust in media and hopefully drop the lewinsky scandal, it failed horribly, but they have gotten better since.

If researchers read these comments know the cia has mostly dropped the Q ball but might try to pick it back up, if you want to avoid an escalating EU V. russia hot war i recommend you try doing your due diligence in researching the finer points of this first person account, I was there in the moment you are studying and I'm telling you most Q guys posting Q shit were putting on act just like flat earth pushers but just about 80% of people reposting shit are gullible mooks they caught in their webs.

Don't be scared of calling out the US for it's insidious use of disinformation to gaslight a vulnerable public.

A final tip, you need to understand the hegelian dialectic to understand how the CIA and US deep state operate.

TL;DR: Q was co-opted by spooks early for the purpose of engineering a political disaster at the right time and the exit they took was jan 6th, in the hopes of nailing the trump coffin shut and cracking down on political dissent. New info on jan 6th malfeasance indicates the deepstate failed at creating a series of mass casualty events, the refusal to hunt for the failed bomber indicates he was their man, and the attempt by Pelosi to trap representatives with an angry mob and armed unidentified interlopers who opened the gates indicated they want to conduct a pawn sacrifice (deepstate was going to have its own controlled politicians assassinated and or beaten to justify squashing political dissent) common sense from capitol police led to them disobeying direct orders which would have intentionally led to such disaster.

[–] 1 pt

When trump won the primaries Q dropped by to say goodbye and thanks and that the campaign would restructure for the big leagues

This is where Steve bannon takes center stage, after being given complete/ sole control over Trumps digital online Election campaign - he appeared on an early side banner of a Trump running for Pres article (circa 2015 iirc) explaining how 'The Trump Campaign' have employed the data firm Cambridge Analytica and then mentioned something to the effect of '...the great thing about Data analytics is you are able to watch in real time how various themes propagate over social media and the effect it has on users and we're learning what we can do with that and how we can harness it' Pre-identified themes of God, Patriotism and fighting the deep State were used to influence, and at some point whether for plausible deniability to distancing Bannon and Cambridge, Defango (the cicada 3301 larp, illuminati treasure hunt hire, arizona spear of destiny nonsense) and his hand picked cohort of 'baker boys' began to seed Q drops - caught discussing on a livestream (circa 2018 iirc) 'changing trip codes- bc we can'. Q also completely splintered and co-opted the actual citizen led pizzagate investigations after a (((google Earth ))) image was seeded into pizzagate showing a Dept of Energy vehicle parked at or next door to a James Alefentis property - this eventually led to the idea of a Q security clearance insider .... working for Trump to take down the pedos.

TL;DR Q was a concoction of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica to influence Trumps online election campaign after identifying social media/ chans from the earlier account used for the primaries.

[–] 0 pt

This is pretty believable and I think it would explain the change in the format of qdrops, Q #1, probably eric, was straightforward, shared info, asked for feedback, gave thanks, Q #2 starts with bannon's team and is using massive data analytics to run something akin to an ARG among the most committed trump supporters in the online crowd, Q #3 is post election which gets co-opted by glowniggers or just poached by jim who runs 8chan, many theorized Jim Watkins was the donor floating voat while 8chan was closed.

This or something very similar explains the gaps in Qdrops and the change in the content and structure of the information given by Q.

[–] 1 pt

Yep, the promise of good winning out over evil was a timely one people lapped it up and why wouldn't many (initially) ultimately though, those with any developed critical thought would see it for what it really was - kabuki theatre distraction - a modern day internet horoscoping - belief is in the eye of the beholder with bonus tard for 'confirming drops via discernment of arbitrary msm articles' - an endless loop for regurgitating mainstream media.