@online{Papasavva_arXiv2009.04885,
TITLE = {"Is it a {Qoincidence}?": {A} First Step Towards Understanding and Characterizing the {QAnon} Movement on {Voat.co}},
AUTHOR = {Papasavva, Antonis and Blackburn, Jeremy and Stringhini, Gianluca and Zannettou, Savvas and De Cristofaro, Emiliano},
LANGUAGE = {eng},
URL = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04885},
EPRINT = {2009.04885},
EPRINTTYPE = {arXiv},
YEAR = {2020},
ABSTRACT = {Online fringe communities offer fertile grounds for users to seek and share<br>paranoid ideas fueling suspicion of mainstream news, and outright conspiracy<br>theories. Among these, the QAnon conspiracy theory has emerged in 2017 on<br>4chan, broadly supporting the idea that powerful politicians, aristocrats, and<br>celebrities are closely engaged in a global pedophile ring. At the same time,<br>governments are thought to be controlled by "puppet masters," as democratically<br>elected officials serve as a fake showroom of democracy.<br> In this paper, we provide an empirical exploratory analysis of the QAnon<br>community on Voat.co, a Reddit-esque news aggregator, which has recently<br>captured the interest of the press for its toxicity and for providing a<br>platform to QAnon followers. More precisely, we analyze a large dataset from<br>/v/GreatAwakening, the most popular QAnon-related subverse (the Voat equivalent<br>of a subreddit) to characterize activity and user engagement. To further<br>understand the discourse around QAnon, we study the most popular named entities<br>mentioned in the posts, along with the most prominent topics of discussion,<br>which focus on US politics, Donald Trump, and world events. We also use<br>word2vec models to identify narratives around QAnon-specific keywords, and our<br>graph visualization shows that some of QAnon-related ones are closely related<br>to those from the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and "drops" by "Q." Finally, we<br>analyze content toxicity, finding that discussions on /v/GreatAwakening are<br>less toxic than in the broad Voat community.<br>},
}