Papasavva, A;
Blackburn, J;
Stringhini, G;
Zannettou, S;
Cristofaro, ED;
(2021)
"Is it a Qoincidence?": An Exploratory Study of QAnon on Voat.
In: Leskovec, J and Grobelnik, M and Najork, M and Tang, J and Zia, L, (eds.)
WWW '21: Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021.
(pp. pp. 460-471).
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery: New York, NY, USA.
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Abstract
Online fringe communities offer fertile grounds to users seeking and sharing ideas fueling suspicion of mainstream news and conspiracy theories. Among these, the QAnon conspiracy theory emerged in 2017 on 4chan, broadly supporting the idea that powerful politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities are closely engaged in a global pedophile ring. Simultaneously, governments are thought to be controlled by “puppet masters,” as democratically elected officials serve as a fake showroom of democracy. This paper provides an empirical exploratory analysis of the QAnon community on Voat.co, a Reddit-esque news aggregator, which has captured the interest of the press for its toxicity and for providing a platform to QAnon followers. More precisely, we analyze a large dataset from /v/GreatAwakening, the most popular QAnon-related subverse (the Voat equivalent of a subreddit), to characterize activity and user engagement. To further understand the discourse around QAnon, we study the most popular named entities mentioned in the posts, along with the most prominent topics of discussion, which focus on US politics, Donald Trump, and world events. We also use word embeddings to identify narratives around QAnon-specific keywords. Our graph visualization shows that some of the QAnon-related ones are closely related to those from the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and so-called drops by “Q.” Finally, we analyze content toxicity, finding that discussions on /v/GreatAwakening are less toxic than in the broad Voat community.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | "Is it a Qoincidence?": An Exploratory Study of QAnon on Voat. |
| Event: | WWW '21: The Web Conference 2021 |
| ISBN-13: | 978-1-4503-8312-7 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3442381.3450036 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3450036 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License. This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10130483 |
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