No Calm in The Storm: Investigating QAnon Website Relationships
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QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory whose followers largely organize online. In this work, we use web crawls seeded from two of the largest QAnon hotbeds on the Internet, Voat and 8kun, to build a hyperlink graph. We then use this graph to identify, understand, and learn from the websites that spread QAnon content online. We curate the largest list of QAnon centered websites to date, from which we document the types of QAnon sites, their hosting providers, as well as their popularity. We further analyze QAnon websites' connection to mainstream news and misinformation online, highlighting the outsized role misinformation websites play in spreading the conspiracy. Finally, we leverage the observed relationship between QAnon and misinformation sites to build a random forest classifier that distinguishes between misinformation and authentic news sites, getting a performance of 0.98 AUC on a test set. Our results demonstrate new and effective ways to study conspiracy and misinformation on the Internet.
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