Thread by @QOrigins

IT'S GRAPH O'CLOCK, CHILDREN!

Gather 'round for a graph of the "normieficiation" of QAnon (what a GREAT phrase, btw!).

By "normiefication," the authors mean: the spread of QAnon from a small, 4chan-savvy audience to the wider Internet.

Next: analysis!
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/…

As you can see on the FULL graph (click in to expand, naturally), there was a tiny bit of Q-related content leaking onto the wider Internet almost from the start.

Reddit content was at first largely confined to r/conspiracy, and there were a few YouTubers covering Q early on.

So at the VERY beginning -- the period I'm mostly concerned with -- Q was largely a 4chan phenomenon. The data makes it *look* like YouTube, rather than Reddit, was the key driver of QAnon reaching a wider audience.

This is possible, but we don't have info on *views.*

We also don't have data from Twitter or FB, BTW (and the data from 8chan is incomplete -- it's true that Q went on a bit of a posting hiatus around the time they show roughly 0 Q-related activity on 8chan, but I PROMISE discussion was not 0 posts per day).

So this data doesn't tell the FULL story of how we got here.

But the big-picture takeaway is: by the time Q moved to 8chan, on 11/25/17, the center of gravity of the QAnon movement may already have shifted to Reddit and YouTube.

That's *really* interesting! Thanks, authors.😃