  The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) bloodthirsty
politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By
interpreting cryptic "drops" of information from an anonymous insider calling
themselves Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that they are being
led by Donald Trump in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been
covered extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in
multiple violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of
the US Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little
understanding of how the theory evolved and was spread on the Web, and the role
played in that by multiple platforms.
  To address this gap, in this paper we study QAnon from the perspective of "Q"
themself. Specifically, we build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected
from six "aggregation sites," which curate and archive them from their original
posting to anonymous and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites
have a relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops
should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the contents of the Q
drops themselves, identifying topics of discussion, as well as finding
statistically significant indications that drops were not authored by a single
individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit are used to disseminate Q
drops to a wider audience. We find that dissemination was (originally) limited
to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed content moderation
decisions have reduced the overall issue, the "gospel" of Q persists on Web
communities.
