Is an SA journalist ‘Q’?
Yes, say two separate forensic linguistic analyses — he ‘actually played the lead role in writing’ the dangerous conspiracy theory nonsense
“Is Paul Furber really behind the QAnon conspiracy movement?” the SA tech community has been asking itself again this week.
The world was shocked when the Joburg tech journalist was identified in September 2020 in the Reply All podcast as being integral to the origins of QAnon.
And on Sunday The New York Times answered this question. It wrote: “Two teams of forensic linguists say their analysis of the Q texts shows that Furber, one of the first online commentators to call attention to the earliest messages, actually played the lead role in writing them.”
The newspaper concluded that Furber was one of two possible writers of the “Q drops”, as they are called.
The other person is Ron Watkins — on whose website Q messages appeared in 2018, and who is now running for the US Congress. He told the paper: “I am not Q.”
The New York Times article shows how “linguistic detectives find fingerprints” that point to Furber as the original Q.
Well known in journalism and tech industry circles, Furber wrote for tech website ITWeb and its Brainstorm magazine for years, and taught himself a range of tech skills.
Furber told me he had accompanied the police on raids carried out with Anton Pillertype search warrants on premises where he helped police retrieve data off confiscated computers.
At press conferences and industry events he always seemed like a regular, normal guy who loved his children. He was occasionally wacky, like the time he showed up with a mohican haircut, long before it was made hip by David Beckham.
It didn’t help that he rode a motorbike and arrived in full black leather riding gear that day.
I’ve been trying to remember the last time I saw him, which was some time in 2010 or 2011, when a bunch of us got together for Mandela Day to do digital community work. Furber and two or three others edited Wikipedia pages, I think.
He seems an unlikely booster for the QAnon drivel, but equally unlikely to be Q when compared with who he seemed a decade ago.
The QAnon conspiracy is that the US government is secretly controlled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles, mostly Democrats.
Many of the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6 last year in a failed “insurrection” to stop Joe Biden being certified as president were QAnon supporters.
“QAnon shaman” Jake Angeli, who roamed the Senate building in a fur hat with horns and left a note reading “It’s Only A Matter Of
Time. Justice Is Coming!”, was sentenced to 41 months in jail last November.
Other QAnon supporters have also turned to violence, including one man who staged a 2018 protest on the Hoover Dam with assault rifles demanding that the US government investigate the “cabal” which runs the supposed global satanic child-trafficking ring.
Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel
Pousaz of Swiss start-up OrphAnalytics and French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps did separate analyses using stylometry, a mathematical system that produces results that are “measurable, consistent and replicable”, the newspaper reported.
A similar approach has helped solve other problems, such as the FBI identification of Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber and the uncovering of the fact that Harry Potterauthor JK Rowling had written a detective novel under a pen name in 2013.
“I’d buy it,” Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola told the newspaper, having identified Rowling as the real author of the detective novel Cuckoo Calling.
“What’s really powerful is that both of the two independent analyses showed the same overall pattern.”
Furber’s role in the QAnon saga is linked to the first appearance of messages from Q on online message board 4chan. Furber was the administrator of the particular board where this shadowy character began “dropping” the cryptic messages in 2017 — and seemed to be in some kind of trusted relationship with him.
Fredrick Brennan, who founded the message board 8chan, told Reply All in 2020: “I think Furber is most likely Q. The original Q.”
To a rational person, QAnon reads like a modern-day Nostradamus for stupid people. It seems to be meaningful and to warn about specific things, but they’re so vague as to be easily explained away if they don’t happen.
More people in the US believe in QAnon than in some major religions, a May 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found, with 15% of Americans saying they truly believe in QAnon. Two QAnon-supporting Republicans were elected to the US Congress in 2020: Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado‘s Lauren Boebert.
As The New York Times concludes of the QAnon movement: “Paul Furber was its first apostle.”