Who could be behind QAnon? Authorship attribution with supervised machine-learning

Abstract A series of social media posts on 4chan then 8chan, signed under the pseudonym ‘Q’, started a movement known as QAnon, which led some of its most radical supporters to violent and illegal actions. To identify the person(s) behind Q, we evaluate the coincidence between the linguistic properties of the texts written by Q and to those written by a list of suspects provided by journalistic investigation. To identify the authors of these posts, serious challenges have to be addressed. The ‘Q drops’ are very short texts, written in a way that constitute a sort of literary genre in itself, with very peculiar features of style. These texts might have been written by different authors, whose other writings are often hard to find. After an online ethnography of the movement, necessary to collect enough material written by these thirteen potential authors, we use supervised machine learning to build stylistic profiles for each of them. We then performed a ‘rolling analysis’, looking repeatedly through a moving window for parts of Q’s writings matching our profiles. We conclude that two different individuals, Paul F. and Ron W., are the closest match to Q’s linguistic signature, and they could have successively written Q’s texts. These potential authors are not high-ranked personality from the US administration, but rather social media activists.