Thread by @_MAArgentino

1/ @JordanWildon and I looked at data from 30 QAnon Telegram chats to try and estimate the size of the QAnon community.

We found that there are 135,150 active accounts. QAnon is not Dead, rather it is the most active extremist community on Telegram. gnet-research.org/2021/07/28/qan…

2/ We didn't simply rely on registered accounts, rather we looked at the posting history of accounts and measured how often individual accounts sent messages or replies, or forwarded content from elsewhere. logically.ai/articles/new-t…

3/ this is important as plenty of users likely joined Telegram immediately after QAnon social media bans, but found the platform difficult to use, overwhelmed by constant message notifications, or been uninterested in the content, and logged off forever.

4/ When you log off your account is still "active" and you would still appear in the count. Also of importance is the basic security feature of Telegram, whereby an account is deleted after 6 months of inactivity.

5/ We broke down the groups be regions, based on the location of influencers, the sociopolitical content being discussed, the language, or the known location of the influencer. Of note is that QAnon EU and International surpass QAnon US/Influencers (who are almost all american)

6/ This speaks to how active and present the international QAnon community is today on Telegram, but also how this echoes international reporting on the movement.

7/ Like in most chats, the majority of the community are lurkers, observing what is going on. On average about 1% of users have posted between 100 and 1000 times. The exception is the influencer chats, where the community is more active as the respond to the influencers channel.

8/ From the remaining users, which we categorised as regularly active, 1.68% (4,599) are responsible for the vast majority of posts made into these groups, 3.35% (9,219) being moderately active (25 to 100 posts), and 20.36% (56,035) being only a little active (2 to 24 posts).

9/ We found that 74.62% of users either had never posted or posted only once (likely to complete the verification to join the chat). While single posts are enough to confirm an account entering a group is intentional, these users can not be considered active participants.

10/ One segment we were not able to measure is the comment section in Telegram channels. Channel admin can open up a "comment" section under a channel post, so some users like GhostEzra has thousands of comments under his channel posts, which are not accounted for.

11/ There are limitations to this analysis. 30 Chats is obviously a sample, though these are the largest and most active by our estimation. Further, we cannot account for the amount of active members in the comment sections of channels at this time

12/ We measured active, by posting patterns; however it is important to note that consumption of extremist content is active behavior, just one we cannot measure. Consuming content online without engaging, but acting out offline is very likely a reality for many QAnon adherents.

13/ Therefore, the estimation of 135,150 users in chats does not account for those who prefer to spend their times in Channels, or who may be active on other alt-tech platforms and may simply be using Telegram and an information consumption ecosystem.

14/ This also does not account for QAnon adjacent communities or soft-QAnon communities active in other ecosystems, and who may not be using clear QAnon related language, but abides by their narratives and tropes.

15/ What this implies is that the active QAnon community, though likely smaller than it was in 2020, very likely surpasses our estimation. Within this pool of actors you have a mix of violent and non-violent extremists. Nevertheless, QAnon is not dead for now.