Does the QAnon conspiratorial movement come from South Africa?
A QAnon activist at a Donald Trump rally on August 2, 2018 in Pennsylvania, United States.
Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
According to specialists, the first messages posted at the end of 2017 by the mysterious Q were written by Paul Furber, a South African journalist, specialist in new technologies and apostle of conspiracy theories of the QAnon movement.
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With our correspondent in Johannesburg,
Romain Chanson
Could the QAnon conspiracy movement come from South Africa?
In part, according to a survey conducted by two teams of language experts, in France and Switzerland.
► Read also:
QAnon, the conspiratorial movement that supports Donald Trump
One of the conspiracy theories claims to expose pedophile and satanic networks among the American elites.
Against them, QAnon supporters see former President Donald Trump as a bulwark, the defender of the United States.
Very American-centric conspiracy theories, and yet they were indeed written in South Africa.
Q had to be a senior US official.
It would actually be Paul Furber, 55, a resident of Johannesburg.
The journalist had made a name for himself by feeding QAnon theories on social networks.
Maybe too talkative.
His writing style ended up linking him to the mysterious Q, explains Jean-Baptiste Camps, philologist and investigator.
“
What artificial intelligence has learned to recognize are characteristics of what linguists call the idiolect, that is to say the language spoken by a person.
Typically, his personal communications are peppered with racial slurs.
If we take his public communications, it is a much less marked language from this point of view.
But we will still notice the same regularities in the use of verbs, determiners, etc.
»
That a South African is at the origin of a very American conspiracy theory shows how much Donald Trump's mandate has inspired extreme movements around the world, according to Florian Cafiero, statistician at the CNRS and co-author of the 'investigation :
“
Paul Furber passed himself off as a close friend of Donald Trump to the entire internet community at the time.
Q, that's it: it's the story of someone who would have liked to work for Donald Trump and who would have wanted Trump to be the symbol of something great.
»
Asked by the
New York Times
, Paul Furber denies being the origin of QAnon, just like the American conspirator Ron Watkins who would have taken over.
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