TYB
Where in the World is Q? Clues from Image Metadata
May 10, 2021
The hunt to identify the person or group behind the QAnon conspiracy theory continues. Known only as “Q,” this individual or collective is responsible for the many posts, or “drops,” that appeared on internet imageboards between October 2017 and December 2020.
It has not been an easy search. But a fresh approach has yielded more clues. Image metadata comprises many different kinds of information, some of which can speak to the origin of the image itself and, by extension, who created it. Since many of Q’s posts come with an image attached, examining image metadata can provide clues as to where Q has been — and when.
We examined metadata found on images associated with 27 Q drops. We infer from the metadata that the images are screenshots taken in two time zones: UTC+8 and the Pacific time zone. UTC+8 is a time zone including the Philippines, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, and parts of Indonesia, Russia and Australia. Pacific time includes the West coasts of Canada and the USA, Nevada, part of Idaho, and part of the northwest coast of Mexico.
The vast majority of these images, ranging in date from November 7, 2017 to September 23, 2020, appear to originate from the Pacific time zone, while a handful of remaining images from February 2018 and 2019 appear to originate from UTC+8.
The collection of image files includes both images Q themselves posted and images in posts that Q replied to. Using the information in posts.json, we removed all images posted by anonymous users (“anons”) who were not Q. This results in a dataset of 1,087 images.
We then ran the “exiftool” program to extract image metadata from every image and collated the information into a spreadsheet. This CSV spreadsheet file contains one row per image and 275 columns. Not all columns are populated for each row, since individual images do not typically include every possible kind of metadata.
We spot-checked these photos in their original settings, i.e. on 8chan/8kun as well as 4plebs (a popular 4chan archive) to ensure that the image metadata was present in the original and not an artifact of qalerts.net’s collection process. We found that the metadata was indeed present in the original files. We also uploaded a few sample images to the existing 8kun website, and downloaded them again after they were posted. This allowed us to ascertain that the version of the 8kun website now running neither strips nor adds metadata to images stored on it.
read entire article at:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2021/05/10/where-in-the-world-is-q-clues-from-image-metadata/
But is the data valid? The exif data in Q's drops? That is the question here. They posted everything in a public repository. Easy to debunk if bogus claims about exif data. Financing is one thing, yes. But pointing that out doesn't automatically debunk what they are saying, does it?
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