No Calm in The Storm: Investigating QAnon Website Relationships

TL;DR

This paper constructs a comprehensive graph of QAnon-related websites, analyzes their connections to misinformation, and develops a classifier to distinguish misinformation sites from authentic news sources.

Contribution

It introduces the largest curated list of QAnon websites, analyzes their online relationships, and presents a novel classifier for misinformation detection.

Findings

QAnon websites are heavily connected to misinformation sites.

Misinformation sites play a significant role in spreading QAnon content.

The random forest classifier achieves high accuracy in distinguishing misinformation from authentic news.

Abstract

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory whose followers largely organize online. In this work, we use web crawls seeded from two of the largest QAnon hotbeds on the Internet, Voat and 8kun, to build a QAnon-centered domain-based hyperlink graph. We use this graph to identify, understand, and learn about the set of websites that spread QAnon content online. Specifically, we curate the largest list of QAnon centered websites to date, from which we document the types of QAnon sites, their hosting providers, as well as their popularity. We further analyze QAnon websites' connection to mainstream news and misinformation online, highlighting the outsized role misinformation websites play in spreading the conspiracy. Finally, we leverage the observed relationship between QAnon and misinformation sites to build a highly accurate random forest classifier that distinguishes between misinformation and authentic news sites. Our results demonstrate new and effective ways to study the growing presence of conspiracy theories and misinformation on the Internet.