State of research

Where to start

A selection of readings to get into the subject: histories of the movement, the reference edited volume, data and platform studies.

1. Rothschild, M. (2021). The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.

   Journalistic history of QAnon from 2017 to 2021 by a conspiracy-theory writer: origins, key figures, failed prophecies and spread. An updated edition appeared in 2022.

2. Sommer, W. (2023). Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.

   Journalistic account of QAnon's rise by a reporter who covered it from the start, from 4chan to its influence on Republican officials.

3. Miller, M. K. (2023). The Social Science of QAnon: A New Social and Political Phenomenon.

   Edited volume (ed. Monica K. Miller) bringing together psychologists, political scientists and sociologists on QAnon followers, cognitive drivers, political uses and media spread.

4. de Zeeuw, D., Hagen, S., Peeters, S. & Jokubauskaitė, E. (2020). Tracing normiefication.

   Cross-platform analysis of QAnon from 2017 onward, theorised as 'normiefication': after incubating on 4chan/pol/, it migrated to YouTube and Reddit, with news media covering it only once it moved offline.

5. Papasavva, A., Aliapoulios, M., Ballard, C., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., Zannettou, S., et al. (2022). The Gospel according to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information.

   Builds a corpus of 4,949 'canonical' drops from six aggregation sites, whose low agreement suggests some drops are apocryphal; topic and style analysis indicates the drops were not written by a single individual.

6. Enders, A. M., Uscinski, J. E., Klofstad, C. A., Wuchty, S., Seelig, M. I., Funchion, J. R., et al. (2022). Who Supports QAnon? A Case Study in Political Extremism.

   Using six polls (2018-2020), shows that QAnon support is meagre and stable; it relates to the extremity rather than the direction of political orientations, and is best explained by conspiratorial worldviews and dark-triad personality traits.

7. Jensen, M. A. & Kane, S. (2024). QAnon-inspired violence in the United States: an empirical assessment of a misunderstood threat.

   Examination of 100 QAnon sympathisers who committed crimes in the United States through August 2021: the authors conclude QAnon is dangerous but not a traditional terrorist threat. Published online in 2021.

8. Argentino, M. A. (2025). QAnon: From Conspiracy Theory to New Religious Movement.

   Monograph analysing QAnon as a new religious movement: lived religious practice, 'pastel QAnon', gender-based violence, ideologically motivated crime and its trajectory after 6 January 2021.

9. Bloom, M. & Moskalenko, S. (2021). Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon.

   Book by two radicalisation scholars on the psychology of QAnon followers, the role of women ('pastel QAnon') and online radicalisation dynamics.

10. Marwick, A. E. & Partin, W. C. (2024). Constructing alternative facts: Populist expertise and the QAnon conspiracy.

    Study of QAnon followers' 'research' practices, described as a populist expertise that mimics the forms of scholarly knowledge production. Published online in 2022.

11. Cafiero, F. & Camps, J. B. (2023). Who could be behind QAnon? Authorship attribution with supervised machine-learning.

    Authorship attribution of the Q drops with supervised machine learning, comparing their style with a list of suspects from journalistic investigations; the study links early drops to Paul Furber and later ones to Ron Watkins, both of whom deny it. Preprint on Zenodo (February 2022, doi 10.5281/zenodo.6164620).

12. Wu Ming 1 (2022). Q comme qomplot : Comment les fantasmes de complot défendent le système.

    French translation (Anne Echenoz and Serge Quadruppani) of 'La Q di Qomplotto' (2021). The essay analyses QAnon as a 'conspiracy fantasy', starting from its resemblance to the 1999 novel 'Q' published under the name Luther Blissett.

Birth on 4chan and spread across platforms

"Q"'s first post appeared on 28 October 2017 on 4chan's /pol/ board, in a milieu, archived in detail (Papasavva et al., 2020), that had already collectively produced the "Pizzagate" theory in 2016 (Tuters et al., 2018; Bleakley, 2023; Tangherlini et al., 2020). Early readers took it as a possible role-play (LARP) (de Zeeuw & Gekker, 2023), and the founding threads already mixed participatory investigation, decoding and storytelling (Hodges, 2023). A few promoters took it off the board as early as November 2017, to Reddit and YouTube (Zadrozny & Collins, 2018). The hypothesis that it was inspired by the 1999 novel "Q" by the Italian collective Luther Blissett has circulated, but the shared elements are too general to establish it (Thévenet, 2020; Wu Ming 1, 2022; Cacopardi, 2023).

Its spread followed a staged "normiefication", with incubation on anonymous boards, migration to YouTube and Reddit, then news coverage once the movement went offline (de Zeeuw et al., 2020). Platform studies then describe each refuge: Voat after the Reddit bans (Papasavva et al., 2021; Mekacher & Papasavva, 2022), Facebook until 2020 (Kim & Kim, 2023; Institute for Strategic Dialogue & NewsGuard, 2020), Parler and Gab (Sipka et al., 2022; Bär et al., 2023), Telegram (Zihiri et al., 2022; Hoseini et al., 2023), and Poal after Voat closed (Papasavva & Mariconti, 2024).

This site finds these migrations in the corpus as board changes, breaks in activity regimes and stylistic differences between platforms (Statistics, Activity).

Who wrote it? Canonical corpus and authorship attribution

There is no official corpus of drops. Aggregation sites disagree, suggesting some posts are apocryphal (Papasavva et al., 2022). "Lost" posts from October 2017 shed light on the very beginning (The Q Origins Project, 2021). This site uses the JSON-QAnon corpus (Kingsman, 2021).

Three stylometric studies conclude there were at least two successive writers (OrphAnalytics, 2020; Papasavva et al., 2022; Cafiero & Camps, 2023; OrphAnalytics, 2022). Two independent teams linked the early drops to a South African board moderator and the later ones to the administrator of 8chan/8kun. Both deny it (Kirkpatrick, 2022). The authors present these attributions as plausible hypotheses, not proof (Storchan, 2022), and linguists discuss their limits (Authier, 2022). The same method applied to the five very short posts of June 2022 is even more fragile (OrphAnalytics, 2022).

This site's exploratory stylometry places the sharpest break in late November 2017, when Q moved to 8chan, without being able to separate a change of author from a change of platform (Discourse).

A discourse to be decoded

Drops work through questions, clues and injunctions to "do your own research", and the cryptic writing hands interpretation to readers and gives them an active role (McIntosh, 2022; Sayers et al., 2025). A qualitative analysis of all the posts sorts them into five registers, from hidden knowledge to calls to action (Linvill et al., 2021). Followers' "research" mimics the forms of scholarly knowledge, a "populist expertise" that claims the authority of knowledge against that of experts (Marwick & Partin, 2024), within their own epistemic communities (Robertson & Amarasingam, 2022; Baća, 2024; Forberg, 2023).

Folklorists see it as a "superconspiracy" that pulls older narratives together (Bodner, 2025; Ellis, 2025; Tangherlini et al., 2023), in line with work on apocalyptic visions (Barkun, 2013). A content analysis of the 4,966 drops describes a temporality of repetition and determinism (Bimo, 2026).

This site measures these traits. It finds on average more than one question mark per drop, recurring formulas, shifting themes, bursty writing and constant references to anons and to Q's own drops (Discourse, Glossary, Statistics).

Prophecies that fail

QAnon's history is punctuated by unfulfilled announcements, from Hillary Clinton's arrest announced for 30 October 2017 to the 2021 inauguration (Rothschild, 2021; Tian, 2021). Cognitive dissonance theory, born from the study of a group awaiting the end of the world (Festinger et al., 1956), is often used to explain followers' persistence. Studies distinguish hardliners, those who adapt their belief and those who drop it (Westmark & McMahon, 2022), and describe how the movement adapted after its failures (Wright & Wright, 2023).

This site counts predictions across the whole corpus and checks one by one the 290 specific or dated announcements extracted automatically (40 of which turn out, on review, not to be predictions). Only a minority of checkable predictions came true, and fewer still outside already announced or scheduled events. Announced deadlines are mostly very close (Predictions, Statistics).

How many followers?

Polls give very different orders of magnitude depending on the measure. Explicit support for the "movement" stays low and stable, around 5 to 8% of Americans between 2018 and 2021 (Enders et al., 2022; Uscinski & Enders, 2023). Measures based on agreement with the theory's statements give more: 14% "believers" in March 2021, 17% in October, 18% in March 2022, 23% in August 2023, 19% in 2024 (PRRI, 2021; PRRI, 2022; PRRI Staff, 2022; PRRI, 2023; PRRI Staff, 2024). In late 2020, 17% of Americans judged QAnon's core claim about a paedophile elite to be true (Ipsos, 2020), and about one in five recognised and believed at least one QAnon-born theory, while only 7% viewed the movement favourably (Schaffner, 2020). Name recognition doubled in 2020 (Blazina, 2020; Mitchell et al., 2020). 2020 media coverage often overstated the movement's size (Uscinski, 2022).

Support relates to the extremity rather than the direction of political views, to conspiratorial worldviews (Enders et al., 2022) and to antisocial and anti-establishment traits (Enders et al., 2023). Links also exist with evangelical religiosity (Beyer & Herrberg, 2023) and with antisemitism (Levin et al., 2022).

This site's public-interest data (Wikipedia article views) measure curiosity, not support (Public interest).

Followers' psychology and the cost to relatives

The motives described involve the need to understand, to feel safe and to belong (Green et al., 2023; Fitzgerald, 2022), in a movement that both entertains and isolates (Moskalenko, 2021; Bloom & Moskalenko, 2021). QAnon beliefs correlate with intentions of radical action (Moskalenko et al., 2024).

A recent field studies what relatives go through, from broken ties to epistemic conflict and family distress (Moskalenko et al., 2023; Mastroni & Mooney, 2024; Jordan & Whitmer, 2023), including from the testimonies posted on r/QAnonCasualties (Phillips, 2025; Haupt et al., 2025; Doan et al., 2026).

Cult, religion or political movement?

QAnon has been described as a quasi-religious phenomenon built on prophecy (LaFrance, 2020), as an internet-facilitated cult (Cohen, 2022) or as a new religious movement (Argentino, 2025; Argentino, 2026). Others find these labels questionable (Amarasingam et al., 2023) or see a mix of religious belief and political mobilisation (Foertsch et al., 2023; Bromley & Richardson, 2023). Several works study its ties with evangelical Christianity and Christian nationalism (QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories, 2023; Lundskow & MacMillen, 2023; Uca, 2026; Ippolito, 2025).

In the drops themselves, religious or moral vocabulary remains a minority and does not grow. It peaks in the first weeks, late 2017. The religiosity these works describe is mainly that of the followers (Statistics).

Women, mothers and "pastel QAnon"

In 2020 the #SaveTheChildren campaign brought QAnon into women's wellness and motherhood networks, the "pastel QAnon" aesthetic (Bloom & Moskalenko, 2022; Bracewell, 2021; Andrade, 2023). Harassment of celebrities targeted by these narratives has been measured at scale (Gallagher et al., 2022). Multi-level-marketing distributors acted as relays (Mastrangelo & Longo, 2024). These child-trafficking narratives compete with information from specialised NGOs (Patane et al., 2026; Moran et al., 2023; Kim & Buntain, 2025).

US politics, 6 January and violence

QAnon moved from the fringe to part of the Republican electorate, with congressional candidates who embraced it (Sommer, 2023; Lukito et al., 2025; Rothschild, 2022). Criticism of these candidates by other lawmakers reduces support for the theory, not for the candidate (Wu et al., 2022). The House of Representatives condemned QAnon in October 2020 (U.S. House of Representatives, 2020). With no identifiable leader, Q exercises "spectral" leadership (Cover et al., 2022).

As early as 2019 the FBI assessed that these theories motivated some extremists (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2019). The count of QAnon-linked offenders lists about a hundred cases in the United States up to 2021, a majority of them Capitol attack participants (Jensen & Kane, 2021; Jensen & Kane, 2024; Amarasingam & Argentino, 2020; Jensen & Kane, 2021). The House select committee's final report devotes a section to QAnon (Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, 2022). Trump's speeches and online QAnon activity before 6 January are linked (Lee et al., 2022; Vishnuprasad et al., 2024).

This site compares Trump's tweets with the drops and measures the place of 6 January in public interest (Q and Trump, Public interest).

Platform moderation

Reddit closed the first communities in 2018, then Facebook and YouTube acted in 2020 (Meta, 2020; YouTube, 2020) and Twitter suspended more than 70,000 accounts after 6 January 2021 (Twitter, 2021). That last wave reduced the circulation of misinformation on the platform (McCabe et al., 2024; Graphika, 2021). QAnon's hallmark phrases then declined on the major platforms without regaining their past audience elsewhere (Holt & Rizzuto, 2021). Conspiracy communities withstand bans better than others (Monti et al., 2023), and banned users migrate to smaller platforms (Engel et al., 2022; Rastogi et al., 2025; Papasavva & Mariconti, 2024), where the movement has fragmented (Audureau, 2022).

Beyond the United States

QAnon went abroad in 2020, carried by the pandemic and adapting to local contexts (Sauvage, 2020; NewsGuard, 2020; Hoseini et al., 2023; Gruszko & Gajewski, 2025). A data investigation across twelve countries follows these channels and their narratives from country to country (Lighthouse Reports & Bellingcat, 2022; Reynaud & Brandy, 2022). Case studies cover Canada and Quebec (Argentino & Amarasingam, 2021; Kovac, 2020; Celestini & Amarasingam, 2023; Turgeon, 2026), France, where the outlet Les DéQodeurs became one of its main relays from 2020 (Wheeldon, 2021; Macé & Plottu, 2021; Conspiracy Watch, s.d.; Harfoush, 2021; Conspiracy Watch, 2021), French-speaking Switzerland (Farahmand et al., 2023), the United Kingdom (HOPE not hate, 2020), Central Europe (Hermanova, 2023), Brazil (Nalon, 2020), Germany and Austria, where 12% and 16% of people agree at least in part with its narratives and where it joined the "sovereign citizens" (Reichsbürger, who deny the legal existence of the German state) (Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, 2020; Holnburger et al., 2022; Kleinen-von Königslöw & von Nordheim, 2021; Fiebig, 2026), Italy (Pasquetto et al., 2022; Murru, 2022), Australia and New Zealand (Jones, 2023; Ross, 2020; Robie, 2022), Japan (Mimizuka et al., 2024; Mimizuka, 2025; Yeung & Sukegawa, 2022) and sub-Saharan Africa (Kohnert, 2023). How the French general public perceives QAnon remains little studied. An exploratory qualitative study (ten interviews) finds it little known and seen as an American phenomenon (Aubry, 2024).

Country mentions in the drops remain centred on the United States and its designated enemies (Actors, News).

What this site adds

Among the works gathered in this site's bibliography, those on followers and platforms predominate. A few analyse the drops themselves (Linvill et al., 2021; Papasavva et al., 2022; Bimo, 2026), but we know of none that systematically confronts them with the news. This site does so across the whole corpus, with published methods and data: synchrony with Trump's tweets tested against two null models, over-representation of actors relative to world news (GDELT), sourced prediction-by-prediction verification, rhythm and activity breaks (Q and Trump, News, Predictions, Statistics, Method).