Thread by @bellingcat

Where in the world is Q, the imageboard user whose mysterious “drops” spawned an army of followers? Thanks to image metadata, we may finally have an answer -- albeit a very broad one.
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Highlighted below are the only two time zones where, in our sample, two or more of Q’s images were taken. The vast majority were from the Pacific time zone.

Most images in Q drops don’t have enough useful metadata to analyse, but a specific subset does. They're screenshots from a phone. In the “DateCreated” field, we found timestamps that reveal the time when Q took these screenshots, just before posting a drop with them attached.

There’s no time zone info in DateCreated, but by subtracting it from the drop’s UTC timestamp, we can infer the time zone where Q took the screenshots.

This “time diff” represents the time between Q taking the screenshot & posting the drop, plus the UTC offset of Q’s time zone.

Our sample of unique images with metadata, though it consists of only 29 images, covers almost Q’s entire operational history. It runs from November 7, 2011 (on 4chan, before Q’s first tripcode) to September 23, 2020.

In all this time, Q only posted from UTC +8 on three dates. By contrast, Q posted from the Pacific time zone on 16 separate dates. This suggests Q may be based in the Pacific time zone and has travelled to East Asia.

We've been able to geolocate the images from East Asia, most likely, to several hotels in Shanghai, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Chongqing.

As millions of people live in both these time zones, these findings do not prove that any particular individual as being Q. But they do offer a starting point to refine the search.

Read the article and access an interactive dataset here, thanks to the hard work and sharp minds of @QOrigins, @BobPythonic and @kunstderfuge1.
bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-w…

If you're interested in reading more of our work on the QAnon conspiracy theory, access Bellingcat's complete oeuvre (Qoeuvre?) here:
bellingcat.com/tag/qanon/