So @kunstderfuge1 made a graphic re: what we do and don't know based on pictures from the drops.
The gist of it is, as I mentioned elsethread, that *if* the person who took the screenshots is *also* the person who made the posts,
*then* we know what timezone the post is from.
If they're separate people -- if someone is taking that screenshot and then emailing or texting it to Q, who THEN posts -- all we know is that Q has a confederate *in that time zone.*
To me, this is a somewhat academic distinction. If you're providing content for the Q drops...
well, then you're Q, right? Q is the person *or team* that creates the drops.
And if, OTOH, Q is a single person just going through their old photos and screenshotting good ones so they'll be right at the top of the list when they go to make a phonepost on 8kun... 'kay, great.
In that case we DO have Q's location.
Either way, we know where SOMEONE who provided content for the drops was on a particular date. Which is more than we had before!
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This couldn't go into the piece, BUT: y'know how all the photos we looked at were screenshots?
In my *opinion*, Q was sitting on their couch, scrolling through old photos 'til they found one they wanted to use; screenshotting to put it @ the top of the list; and phoneposting.
So my /personal take/ is that Q was probably physically in, and posting from, the places where the screenshots were created.
However, we can't *rule out* the possibility that someone else screenshotted the photos and texted them to Q (or emailed or whatever).
Which is why the piece very carefully does not say that the place the screenshot is taken was the place the post was made from. We don't *know* that.
I am pleased to announce the first forensic evidence of Q’s whereabouts, discovered by my colleague Abigail X (@BobPythonic) with help from Robert Amour (@kunstderfuge1). The full story is up @Bellingcat; we summarize our work in this thread.
Using image metadata, we have been able to geolocate Q to a specific part of the world. Highlighted below are the only two time zones where, in our sample, two or more of Q’s images were taken.
The *vast* majority, ~68%, were from the Pacific time zone.
So… how did we do it?
Most images in Q drops don’t have enough useful metadata to analyze, but a specific subset, images which are phone screenshots, do. In the “DateCreated” field, we found a series of timestamps that reveal the time when Q took these screenshots, just before posting the drop.
Here are some replies to GhostEzra’s “100 million armed patriots… synagogue of Satan” post, from the “peaceful research movement” that is QAnon
And yes, that IS a closet full of ammo in image 3: image 4 has it in detail.
More replies, including from a gentleman who claims to have lots and lots of “ghost guns,” which is… not especially legal, last I heard.
This dude is on some Rwanda shit.
Rwanda is my darkest scenario for how the current political situation ends. The right DOES have a lot of heavily-armed people who think of liberals as monstrous and subhuman. It could happen here.
If I were a conspiracy-theory *evangelist,* I would think long and hard about decoupling the slavery claim from the genocide claim, bc you can point —for instance— at how Amazon treats its workers and delivery drivers, which is basically a 21st-century version of 19th-c BS.
2/4
But, happily for all of us, conspiracy theories aren’t really crafted to *spread as rapidly as possible.*
They’re crafted to meet the emotional needs of their adherents.
So lots of plausible lines of attack get left on the cutting-room floor bc they *don’t* meet those needs.
I don't think I've ever posted about Legit Internal Happenings, yet *another* proto-Q LARP.
Longtime followers already know this, but for newbies: /pol/ was ripe for something exactly like QAnon. Legit Internal Happenings was active in February 2017.
But read this:
If you didn't or couldn't click in, an anon asked whether "pedos" were getting "BTFO'd" (stands for blown the fuck out," btw). "Yes," says Legit Internal Happenings, "and it will only get worse from here."
Cue questions about public trials and politicians as the guilty parties.
But here's the thing: this guy only lasted for three threads (as far as I've been able to find).
What would've happened if he'd developed the pedogate angle a *little* bit more?
I suspect he wouldn't have been *as* successful as Q, but I bet he would've retained an audience.
In archaeology, you're always *one find away* from revising your opinion.
This is one of those finds. It *strongly* suggests that the same person was posting as Q both at the very beginning, in 11/2017, and months later in 5/2018.
Prior to this find, it was conventional wisdom among Q-watchers that the "Q" persona had changed hands in 1/2018. That wasn't TOTALLY uncontested, but it was frequent.
But here's the problem for that view: in 11/2017, Q posted a picture (*maybe* of the islands off Hong Kong...
according to some experts I've been talking to).
In 5/2018, Q posted another photo *of the same islands clearly taken in the same flight.*
So if Q wasn't the same person on both dates... how'd that happen?