Very interesting stats on QAnon worldwide (let's see how many MSM journalists steal his research!):
https://twitter.com/_MAArgentino/status/1292245485403635712
http://archive.md/Abayr
Thread
Marc-André Argentino@_MAArgentino
1/ Lets talk about QAnon Worldwide, after compiling data from Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and Instagram I have found evidence of a QAnon presence in 71 countries.
2/ Ground Rules: To make the list you had to meet 2/5:
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Qanon [Name of country]
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Framed QAnon in the countries politics
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Framed QAnon in the countries news
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Admins were from said country
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QAnon content was predominantly in [country language]
3/ I focused on groups, pages and channels for Telegram and Facebook. For Instagram and Twitter I focused on accounts branded as an org/influencer and not an everyday QAnon individual (i.e. personal assessment and subject matter expertise came into play here).
4/ Furthermore, the content of the page had to be predominantly QAnon, but could be labeled something non-QAnon (e.g. brexit, finxit, yellow vests, gilet jaunes, anti-gov X, anti-policy X, etc.)
5/ I also took advantage of Facebook's recommendation algorithm to find some of these groups, though that has gotten less useful in the past 3 weeks since the platform appears to be limiting QAnon promotion. There are OSINT workarounds for researchers though.
6/ Here are the countries:
7/ The Qmap paints a sobering picture of the transnational spread of QAnon. It has overcome greo-political, cultural, religious, economic and linguistic barriers. QAnon also takes on a distinct flavor in each country that has adopted it.
8/ The movement is manifested in 2 ways abroad: A) There are deep states in every country, the US deep state is the first of many to be toppled; B) there is a single deep state and international QAnon believers call upon Trump and Q-team to send the US army abroad to liberate them
9/ Using Facebook data from @crowdtangle, I seperated QAnon groups into USA and International Categories and compared them of a 3 year period and a 6 month period to try and determine when transnational growth began
10/ In total I have 218 QAnon Groups: 118 USA, 100 International and 255 QAnon Pages 154 USA, 101 International
11/ Based on page likes/group membership we see international groups appeared late 2018 early 2019, but they didn't multiply until February 2020 around the time Europe started reporting cases of COVID-19, and spike in followers after things began to settle a bit in the EU in May
12/ We see similar patterns of behavior in the post count and interactions with posts.
13/ If we zoom into the activity since 2020, we can see the spikes. What I am hopping to do is to try and correlated these with geopolitical events and see is there is causation.
14/ Activity wise we can see the international groups are posting as much as the US based groups.
15/ The interactions are telling as well, though US and International groups follow interaction and posting patterns there are distinct peaks and valleys from one another. What this likely means is that US and International communities are distinct and mutually reinforcing.
16/ I'd like to highlight that based on a qualitative assessment, not all of these group are canon to QAnon. Within the aggregate of these QAnon communities I have notice that the idea has metastasized into QAnon-alt and QAnon-light communities. This may hint to QAnon's future.
17/ QAnon has also captured the interest of foreign media, I have recently done interviews for Belgian
https://lalibre.be/international/amerique/qanon-comment-un-culte-conspirationniste-pro-trump-est-ne-sur-internet-5f246a1dd8ad586219badd43… Polish https://lalibre.be/international/amerique/qanon-comment-un-culte-conspirationniste-pro-trump-est-ne-sur-internet-5f246a1dd8ad586219badd43…
Italian
https://repubblica.it/tecnologia/2020/07/30/news/qanon_ecco_come_il_cospirazionismo_americano_sta_mettendo_radici_in_italia-263229363/amp/…
and Danish https://berlingske.dk/internationalt/qanon-venter-paa-trumps-tusindaarsrige-og-de-er-klar-til-at-kaempe… papers
[Pix continued on Part 2]