Our month-by-month analysis reveals the story of QAnon’s growth, showing how this notorious conspiracy theory has been able to evolve its narratives and adapt to contradictions — potentially allowing it to live on. bellingcat.com/news/americas/…
Bellingcat researchers analysed a dataset containing 4,952 so-called “Q drops”, the cryptic messages that are at the heart of the conspiracy theory, from October 2017 to October 2020.
Researchers then split the data into subsets of one to three month intervals and ran a clustering algorithm to group sentences of a similar sentiment (evaluated using the Universal Sentence Encoder). This allowed us to summarise major topics in Q drops for each time period.
The word clouds shown in the timeline include the most common words or themes of Q drops throughout a given period. Here are the results for the 148 "Q drops" from October 2020. 
Each section of the timeline also provides political context and information on particularly important Q drops — the first use of certain terms or first mention of certain figures. This offers a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of how the conspiracy theory has evolved.
Don't forget to revisit our longread by @QOrigins on how QAnon went from "yet another LARP" from the darker corners of the internet to a part-cult, part-conspiracy that has ruined countless lives. bellingcat.com/news/americas/…
@QOrigins And last but not least, a thanks to the author @edward_the6, who teamed up with Bellingcat's Tech Team to make this timeline possible.
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