Some initially believed that someone had hijacked Q, a belief furthered when whoever it was responded to a couple of comments by writing, “Confirmed. Do not fuck with us. Q.” This message also included Q’s tripcode.

Watkins posted a screenshot of this interaction on Telegram. “I am working on it,” he wrote. “We are having some attacking going on.”

The narrative that someone had taken over the Q account soon crumbled, however, when people realized the so-called hijacker had simply copied Q’s tripcode.

“They’re just putting the tripcode right there with the username,” the Q Origins Project tweeted. “It’s not a Q takeover, it’s just a copy-paste.”

Many clowned on Watkins for falling for such a rudimentary impersonation attempt on his own website.

8chan cofounder turned Watkins/8kun critic, Fredrick Brennan, tweeted, “God this is hilarious. Jim Watkins freaked out. Shut off his own server. Because he saw an obviously fake Q drop.”

“Then he puts 8kun in read only mode. And finally, he fucks up the SSL and now it’s unreadable,” Brennan added.

Jim Watkins eventually also realized that no one had actually hijacked Q. “It is fake, it is not blinking. I am just stressing out, so I copied it,” he wrote.

“It wasn’t Q so it won’t go there, it is just someone putting the trip name in the name field,” he added, referring to aggregator sites that collect Q drops.

Some concluded that Watkins’ reaction to the fake Q post provides further proof that he’s either behind the account or working with whoever is.

“Epic trolling aside, today’s reaction from Jim Watkins (freak the fuck out) to a minor prank adds more circumstantial evidence to him posting or enabling the ‘new Q’ drops. It was business as usual when Q posts again, but unexpected Q?! Oh fuck oh shit,” @BlueAnonBurner tweeted.