Method, sources and limitations
Corpus
Drops come from the Kaggle dataset "QAnon Posts" (jkingsman/qanondrops), itself derived from the qanon.pub aggregator. Each drop has a Unix timestamp, site (4chan, 8chan, 8kun), board, text, images and the posts it replies to. Texts are not republished here.
Q and Trump
Original @realDonaldTrump tweets (retweets excluded) until the account's suspension (January 8, 2021), timestamped in UTC (checked against publicly dated tweets). For each window from 1 to 60 minutes, the share of drops followed or preceded by a tweet is compared with 1,000 draws of a null model, with a one-sided empirical p-value.
Discourse
Cleaning removes links, references (>>123) and signature. Themes rest on TF-IDF (unigrams and bigrams, English stop words removed, document frequency ≥ 5 and ≤ 40%), 12-component NMF, NNDSVD initialisation. Distinctive words use log-odds with informative Dirichlet prior. Formulas come from the glossary regular expressions. Stylometry uses Burrows' Delta on the 150 most frequent words, in chunks of about 1,500 words.
Actors
Dictionary of public actors built from corpus frequencies, abbreviations checked in context (concordances). A drop "names" an actor if one of its patterns occurs. Associations are measured by normalised PMI over drops.
News (GDELT)
GDELT 1.0 daily event files (October 2017 – January 2021), aggregated by date added (total volume, by country (place of action, FIPS codes) and by actor name (Actor1Name, Actor2Name)). GDELT automatically codes the world's press, so its volumes measure media attention, not the real importance of events.
Public interest
Wikimedia page-view API, human users (automated agents excluded), "QAnon" articles in 11 language editions and related English articles, 2017-2023.
Predictions put to the test
The horoscope test blindly compares a drop with two news lists (real period, random period), judged by the chosen model under sceptical instructions, then applies a binomial test (Predictions page). For recycled prophecies, predictions are grouped by event type and actor. For "Future proves past", we measure the delays of Q's references to his own drops.
Literature watch
Every week the worker queries Crossref and OpenAlex (publications since 2024 whose title or abstract contains "QAnon"). The site lists them with their status (in the bibliography after verification, found but not verified, or rejected after review). None enters the bibliography without review.
Reproducibility
All computation is automated. A resumable worker downloads the sources, runs the analyses and generates this site. Code, dictionaries and timeline are versioned in the repository, and raw results are downloadable (Data page).
Scene sources and licences
- The drops come from the Kaggle dataset "QAnon Posts" (jkingsman/qanondrops), aggregated from qanon.pub (4,966 posts).
- The tweets are the Trump Twitter Archive export (Kaggle codebreaker619/donald-trump-tweets-dataset).
- The timeline is hand-curated, with every date sourced (mostly Wikipedia).
- GDELT 1.0 Event Database (gdeltproject.org)
- Wikimedia REST API, pageviews (wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1)
- Daily news, Wikipedia's "Current events" portal (English), 2017-2021 (Portal:Current events)
- Literature watch (Crossref, OpenAlex)
- Conspiracy Reddit (r/conspiracy, r/The_Donald, r/greatawakening, r/CBTS_Stream, r/QAnonCasualties, r/conspiracytheories), Arctic Shift archive, banned subreddits included (arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com)
- Google Trends, search interest index, United States, 2016-2023 (trends.google.com)
- 4chan /pol/, June 2016-November 2019, dataset by Papasavva, Zannettou, De Cristofaro, Stringhini and Blackburn (ICWSM 2020), reduced to aggregates (doi:10.5281/zenodo.3606810, CC BY 4.0)
Limitations
- The corpus is not canonical, since aggregation sites disagree on which drops count (Papasavva et al., ICWSM 2022). The dataset includes early "Anonymous" posts attributed to Q.
- Correlation is not causation, and a significant test across many windows must be read with multiple comparisons in mind.
- Timestamps are those of board archives, converted to New York time for daily rhythms.