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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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[–] • 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.

[–] • 1 pt

Yea, unless they didnt do that and Only made huge leaps of 'correlation' with case insensitive user names and comments containing their list of 'key words' in the subverses. Bum badda bing - online organizing of jan 6.

[–] • 0 pt

They also may have created an account associated with the webscraper. If so, I'd be curious if it was at all still active. It'd be theoretically able to be identified if you cross referenced the supposed dates of scraping