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The Media

Is QAnon an 8Chan Game Gone Wrong? (ft.com) 190

Posted by EditorDavid from the following-breadcrumbs dept.
This week London's prestigious Financial Times published a 15-minute video investigating the question: "Is QAnon a game gone wrong?" In 2017, the Q team, whoever they may be, made use of the modern equivalent of the Playboy's letters page. It's a message board called 4Chan... A YouTuber called defango has since claimed the work was his. He says he created Q as an alternative reality game, mostly for the LOLs, but also to smoke out bad journalists in the alternative media space. But he also says that in 2018, a man called Thomas Schoenberger wrested control of the game from him... Nobody knows if what he says is really true. What is becoming clear is that the whole thing has run away with itself...

Anyone who plays live action role playing games, known as LARPs, will recognise the gaming elements of QAnon [according to alternate-reality game pioneer Jim Stewartson.] "In 2015, 2016, and 2017, there were a lot of what are called LARPs, live action role playing is what the term means. And it really just means that there is a person pretending to be somebody else. The players knew they weren't real, but it was fun for them to interact with. But what happened on 4Chan and 8Chan is that individual people would go and LARP all by themselves, and create basically a single point of contact for an entire alternate reality game. In 2016, there was FBI Anon, and CIA Anon, Meganon, and all of these different LARPs that were basically practicing, they were prototyping what QAnon is... So it turns out there's a guy named Thomas Schoenberger. He saw this Cicada game as an opportunity to radicalise smart people, and he ended up creating puzzles and calling it Cicada, even though he was not the creator of it."

To this day, no one seems quite sure who the creator of Cicada was. We haven't been able to confirm Thomas Schoenberger's involvement in either Cicada or QAnon... [But Jim Stewartson tells them] "There's a woman named Lisa Clapier who runs an account called SnowWhite7IAM. And her job was to bring people from Cicada to QAnon. So there was a whole theme about follow the White Rabbit. A whole theme around Snow White and Disney characters. And that theme was used specifically to pull people from Cicada into QAnon."
A similar origin story appears in a new article at Heavy.com: Between 2014 and 2016, Schoenberger "stole" Cicada, Heavy's source said, and he started manipulating the puzzle. Later on, while working with Chavez, "breadcrumbs" — vague top secret information hidden in clues, were presented through the Cicada game.

In October 2017 QAnon posts premiered on 4chan, a site Schoenberger was prominent on before moving to 8chan in December, a site run out of the Philippines by pornography mogul and pig farmer, Jim Watkins, Heavy's source said.
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Is QAnon an 8Chan Game Gone Wrong? More

Is QAnon an 8Chan Game Gone Wrong?

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  • As Bricktop said (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rewind ( 138843 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @04:56PM (#60622596)

    Be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm.

  • I always assumed that QAnon was an intentional distraction. That right-wingers created a caricature of what liberals though right-wing kookery would look like, to drive them into a frenzy and distract the left from more important issues.

    Google for "QAnon" and "Amy Coney Barrett". Guess which one gets more hits?

    • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:5, Funny)

      by favihoc811 ( 7353068 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @05:01PM (#60622618)

      Amy Coney Barrett gets 58 million hits and QANon gets 20 million hits. Ergo....she is head of QAnon? I'm so confused?

    • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SkonkersBeDonkers ( 6780818 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @05:06PM (#60622642)

      I always assumed that QAnon was an intentional distraction. That right-wingers created a caricature of what liberals though right-wing kookery would look like, to drive them into a frenzy and distract the left from more important issues.

      I'd say that the exact problem has been that everyone ignored and dismissed it as a surely an elaborate joke for way too long.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

        problem has been that everyone ignored and dismissed it as a surely an elaborate joke for way too long.

        In 2016, the Democrats lost because they ignored the concerns of working-class people in the Midwest.

        How does focusing attention on a few deplorables fix that problem?

        • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:5, Informative)

          by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @05:22PM (#60622696)

          In 2016, the Democrats lost because they ignored the concerns of working-class people in the Midwest.

          As opposed to the con artist who is bankrupting farmers left and right and has to use tens of billions in socialist payments to protect them from his disastrous trade policies.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

            All true. Yet the Democrats are still failing to win these people over.

            Why?

            Perhaps because the average Trump voter has never heard of QAnon, and doesn't understand why Democrats keep telling them that they are all evil deplorable idiots voting against their own interests.

            Maybe you should listen to the concerns of real people instead of paying attention to a few trolls who are trying to get you to do exactly what you are doing.

            • Re: Intentional distraction (Score:5, Interesting)

              by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @06:15PM (#60622840)

              The average Trump voter probably has not heard of Q-Anon, but they still peddle the Q conspiracies. My wife works with several of these people who get most of their news from Facebook. They are not very politically aware and probably do not know what this Q thing is all about, but they are very concerned about Hollywood producers conspiring with the Clintons to run an international child sex operation.

              They see just enough in the mainstream media to validate these ideas, such as the Clinton-Epstein relationship. For some reason they do not harbor the same suspicions of Trump, despite having been just as chummy with Epstein. These people are all nurses, so they are at least somewhat educated.

              The fact is that the Q-Anon nonsense has become very ingrained in Trumpworld. Even if most people have only picked up bits and pieces, such as the deep-state stuff or the anti-Clinton stuff, they are still unwittingly participating in the propagation of the Q conspiracy theory.

            • Re: Intentional distraction (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @06:19PM (#60622856)

              The average Trump voter has never heard of Q. They've just seen QAnon merchandise at every Trump rally. Seen Q shirts, signs, and flags at every pro Trump demonstration. Seen police officials and elected representatives wear Q patches or openly push QAnon theories, or tweet out popular QAnon hashtags. But other than that, nope, they know nothing about it. Maybe we should just take a cue from Trump and his go to response when asked about QAnon, or white supremacy, anti government militias, etc: we can call the Trump version of the Republican party the Modern Know Nothing Party.

              • Re: Intentional distraction (Score:5, Insightful)

                by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @08:06PM (#60623104)

                It's so absurd that Trump can deny knowing about Qanon. Clearly nobody can be that ignorant, and a president no less who should be the most informed person on the planet. It's gotta be trolling, and I do have friends on facebook who will congratulate Trump for trolling the mass media every time Trump says something idiotic. They honestly believe he's a stable genius, and that it's fine for a president to be either stupid, ignorant, or a troll.

            • But Trump won by ignoring the concerns of real people! Those real people turned around and said, "wow, that self proclaimed billionaire is just like us!"

            • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:5, Informative)

              by radarskiy ( 2874255 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @09:07PM (#60623240)

              "a few trolls"

              My aunt got a QAnon screed from the physician's assistant when she last went in for a medical exam. COVID-19 is fake, JFK Jr. is still alive, the whole nine yards.

              The Republican Party is endorsing explicitly QAnon candidates: https://www.newyorker.com/news... [newyorker.com].

              These are not a few trolls, these are people in mainstream society.

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                The sad part is that there will probably never be a reckoning for those people. There won't be a moment where they realize they have been tricked by the most insane bullshit some kids on 4chan could dream up.

                It will just fade away from memory and most of them will vote for the next guy the GOP throws out.

            • All true. Yet the Democrats are still failing to win these people over.

              Why?

              Maybe throwing money at them isn't their highest priority when voting?

              It's politics to say, "Here is your problem, and we shall solve it!"

              To then ask, "What's wrong with them? We solved it! Why won't they vote for us?"

              You can suggest problems, but not order people to believe that's their biggest problem.

              All this identity politics is in the same boat. "You are ordered to think of yourself as a member of one or more groups. We declare each group has problems because others attack the group. You are order

          • Mistakes were made.

            Hopefully they get corrected in two weeks.

        • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:5, Insightful)

          by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @05:49PM (#60622770) Journal

          No.

          In 2016, a senior FBI agent (Comey) violated policy by publicly reporting about an ongoing investigation, and this was enough to get sufficient Clinton voters to stay home such that Trump won.

          Let's not forget that Clinton won the popular vote.

          • Clinton ran her private email server while in office to evade transparency and hide corruption, and the voters deserved to know.

            What happened was: Clinton was an unpopular establishment candidate who had no policies other than 'it's my turn now, I'm a woman, vote for me!' pushed through the primaries by the DNC (as evidenced in leaked emails).

            Trump originally wasn't serious about running and wanted to run as a publicity stunt, but he was amplified by liberal media from day one to create a weak opponent

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by Rhipf ( 525263 )

              So were the people using private email servers during Bush 43's presidency also doing it " to evade transparency and hide corruption"? What about the people in the Trump administration using private emails for official government business?

          • Let's not forget that Clinton won the popular vote.

            And, let's not forget, that the popular vote, in a US presidential elections really doesn't mean anything with regard to the winner, and this has been this way for generations.

            No big surprises there.

            It is set up this way on purpose, to allow every STATE to have its say in the. national election of the president, and not let 2-3 of the most populous states take control and run who is president forever.

            You are a citizen of your state, then you are a citiz

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rhipf ( 525263 )

              It is set up this way on purpose, to allow every STATE to have its say in the. national election of the president, and not let 2-3 of the most populous states take control and run who is president forever.

              Actually the Electoral College was originally set up because the Founding Fathers (or at least a portion of them) didn't trust the common people to elect the President. Originally the members of the Electoral College were just selected by each state (i.e. the were not elected). It wasn't until later that states actually allowed the citizens to vote for the Electors. The number of Electors each state gets is based on the population of the state so theoretically (under the original system of the Electoral Col

        • Sorry, getting 3 million more votes is not "losing because they ignored the concerns of" voters

          • Kind of irrelevant when you live in a union of states, not of people. One of the facts that people stress when convenient, forget when inconvenient.

            I would love to see Trump win the popular vote this time, while Biden wins the election. Letâ(TM)s see how much both sides stick to their âoeprinciplesâ.

            • I would love to see Trump win the popular vote this time, while Biden wins the election. Letâ(TM)s see how much both sides stick to their âoeprinciplesâ.

              What I would love to see, if this "electors are required to vote for the national popular vote winner" thing that some blue states are pushing were to cause a Republican to win even though he would otherwise have lost the electoral vote. I bet you'd see a lot of the people pushing this suddenly start trying to change the rules after the election.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by dcollins ( 135727 )

            Note that Hillary Clinton was voted in the national Gallup poll on "Most admired woman" among Americans for 22 out of the 25 years from 1993-2017 (including every year from 2002-2017). The 2nd-place person for historical wins in that same poll is Eleanor Roosevelt, with 13. It's a rather monumental feat of historical revisionism that Clinton is now regarded as "obviously unlikable".

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallup's_most_admired_man_and_woman_poll

            • It's not uncommon for someone to push both sides of the envelope. Many people loved her, and many people (more, apparently) strongly disliked her. Some people in between like myself were simply incredulous that the best person for the job happened to be the wife of the guy who did it before. That and the way the whole thing seemed to be based on her "paying her dues" to the party. As far as I could see here two main selling points were safeguarding the ACA and that she's a woman.

              I still voted for her, becau

          • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:5, Insightful)

            by backwardsposter ( 2034404 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @08:36AM (#60624354)

            So...a candidate has been unpopular with masses of people for 25 years, and they decide to push her on us instead of another candidate people can get a fresh start with? Got it.

          • one study found that counties that flipped to trump were nearly all places where the racial makeup shifted drastically in the prior decade. Not just immigrant increases but visible racial changes. Keep in mind these were largely white areas where mixed race kids become non-white amplifying the appearance of change.

            Economic changes were not in the study but very likely the case as the middle class has been weakening and the unsustainability of rural / suburbs without more wealth. It will take decades for the

        • Re: Intentional distraction (Score:4, Interesting)

          by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @06:32PM (#60622880)

          I think the problem with this argument is that much of the Trump campaign was predicated on suggesting problems existed where they do not. As a midwesterner, I can confidently say that by the 2016 election we had bounced back from our nadir when Obama first took office. Unemployment was low, farmers were doing well, and manufacturing had actually seen an uptick.

          Trump found a way to appeal to the concerns of the blue collar midwestern voter, but many of these concerns were unfounded or cultural rather than economic. The main thing Trump did successfully was drive trailer trash who usually do not vote to the polls. Mostly, these people were excited to see a racist elevated to the White House.

          • the Trump campaign was predicated on suggesting problems existed where they do not.

            Then perhaps the Democrats could try to win by convincing swing voters that their problems don't exist.

            • Unfortunately, with swing voters especially, untrue emotional appeals tend to be more persuasive than true logical appeals.

              I find it hard to fault the Dems for losing because they were not dishonest enough. Although I can accept that as a true realpolitik argument, I cannot accept it as morally acceptable.

        • I wasn't talking about elections. I was talking about domestic terrorists.

        • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:5, Insightful)

          by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Sunday October 18, 2020 @09:26PM (#60623312) Homepage Journal

          In 2016, the Democrats lost because they ignored the concerns of working-class people in the Midwest.

          Really? How so? I live in the midwest, and my salary is considered working-class. I saw right through the bullshit the GOP was trying to feed us and voted against them in 2016, 2018 and many elections prior to those as well.

          My concerns are - and have been for a long time:

          • Health care
          • Decent wages with some hope for retirement before death
          • Access to a good education for future generations
          • Good environmental stewardship from those in power

          I've never seen the GOP do a good job of any of those. In fact they've demonstrably made them all worse.

          From my vantage point the biggest thing that sent voters to Trump in 2016 was that he was running against a Clinton. Many midwestern republicans that I knew would have sat the election out and let Trump lose, but they sure as well weren't willing to tolerate another President Clinton so they voted against their own interests to prevent that. Hell I knew conservative republicans who would have voted Sanders over Trump, but Clinton was a bridge too far for them.

          Now why are the polls showing the race so close between Trump and Biden? That's the million dollar question. We know that Trump has elevated trolling into a bona fide profession in this country (though most have no idea how to collect a monetary paycheck on it) and that may be part of it. Few people are doing better as a result of Trump's attempt to re-re-introduce Reaganomics.

      • Kind of like how no one takes the Court Jester seriously -- until he says or does something incredibly profound and insightful, all wrapped up in buffoonery and jokes, and it gets people thinking?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        It's crop circles, except for the internet.

    • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @05:07PM (#60622644) Homepage Journal

      It seems to have started as some kind of meme or joke on 4chan. The original "encrypted messages" that were posted are consistent with someone randomly mashing a QWERTY keyboard. Who exactly was behind it is difficult to say but there have been many similar ones on the site.

      The /pol board was quite heavily behind Trump. For some reason the incels thought that he would help them out, and they were pushing all kinds of nonsense like the old Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

      • If I had to guess, the incels were behind Trump because they hate the world.

      • It's pretty standard for your typical 'incel' to blame anything and anyone but themselves for their problems, and being inherently weak-minded and weak-willed, they'll latch on to whoever sounds strong and capable, even if that person is a total sham. So, as you say.
    • Even without all the batshit crazy stuff they're pushing, the whole basis for it is wrong. A Q clearance will get you into a gravel gertie, not give you access to satanic pedophile whatever. For non-nuclear material all the interesting stuff is SCI, but that's compartmented so you'd never know if there were satanic pedophiles in the next compartment. It's just bollocks from top to bottom.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      It does kinda follow the pattern of those fake-feminists that /btards used to create based off what they believed 'feminists' were like. So I could see it as a right wing idea of what they think liberals think of rwnjs.

      • I think you are being purposefully disingenuous when blaming the caricature of right in the eyes of lefties back to right. Caricature of right is literally spoon fed 24x7 through msm, and whether you agree or not, msm is against poor and poor middle class because guess what, this is America and you only worship one god - money - and poor don't make any.

        Seriously, question yourself first. Why is it that you are so acclimatized to the idea that "right wing" and "rwnjs" are pretty much interchangeable?

        FYI, if

    • right-wingers created a caricature of what liberals though right-wing kookery would look like, to drive them into a frenzy and distract the left from more important issues.

      No. Jokesters created a caricature of what they thought right-wing kookery would look like to drive left-wingers and right-wingers into a frenzy.

      Politics is all so retarded that it's pretty easy to just sit back an laugh.

    • This is Trump in a nutshell. 90% distraction, 10% action. Pay too much attention to the distraction and you completely miss what the administration is actually doing. For the President I'd say it's a kind of semi-intentional strategy. He's not quite smart enough for it to be a carefully thought-out strategy and far too much of a narcissist to think that anything he says is not absolutely and unquestionably important.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Basically fun and games and trolling but there definitely is a pro-Trump and Republican tilt, and with those trolls, yeah, not happening for free. Political theatre to make it look like Trump and co were doing something about the swamp, rather than just wallowing in it like the rest.

      Pretty harmless stuff. As for the bullshit of trying to craft the internet so looney tunes types will not over react and go out and do something stupid, anything can trigger those freaks, the news, a tv show, a movie, what ever

    • That right-wingers created a caricature of what liberals though right-wing kookery would look like

      For a cariacature of right wing kookery, there sure is a lot of people who are taking that kookery serious.

      My own cousin has turned into a complete lunatic convinced reptile men and , uh, tom hanks are conspiring to steal children to milk andrenochrome (completely ignoring that adrenochrome is a rather rudimentary compound easily made in a laboratory by oxidizing andrenaline, also its not found in nature.) in v

    • Re:Intentional distraction (Score:4, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @03:47AM (#60623846) Journal

      Right wing makes up a thing. Right wing believes thing to the point where QAnoners are winning Republican senate primaries [independent.co.uk], and yet somehow you conclude ITS TEH LIBRUHLS FAULT!!11one.

      Well, you're as deluded as you usually are in your Slashdot comments, so I guess nothing's new.

    • Like any popular hashtag, it gets hijacked more than it gets legit use. We now have journalists attributing stuff to qanon which cannot be found anywhere in the so-called q drops.

      Much like the media propelled Trump early on in the 2016 elections before realizing their mistake, they are now also propelling and driving most of the qanon stuff out there.

      Their intent may be to attribute so much ridiculous stuff to qanon that people reject it, but Iâ(TM)m pretty sure thatâ(TM)s not how it works. To any

    • I always assumed that QAnon was an intentional distraction. That right-wingers created a caricature of what liberals though right-wing kookery would look like, to drive them into a frenzy and distract the left from more important issues.

      What seems odd to me is that I have a fairly wide variety of viewpoints represented in my Facebook friends list, from people more conservative than I am (i.e., uncomfortably right-wing) to wacko leftists.

      I have heard absolutely nothing -- not one single word -- about this QAnon stuff from any of the moderate-to-right-wing people on my friends list. Nothing. It simply does not exist there.

      But I have gotten walls of text from the left-of-center to wacko leftist side, Viewing With Alarm this ... whatever it

  • There are so many people out there that don't do anything except spend time online. I've watched these folks go from simply watching twitter to now thinking that if they dig deep enough, they'll find the truth on the internet. They seem to forget that random information doesn't just end up on the internet, that its created by people, and posted in some way, some how.

    Normally, this wouldn't be much of an issue. The issue becomes when these people are then the loud ones that drive the conversation. The

  • Everytime the right wing does something aweful (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @05:28PM (#60622714)
    and gets called out on it it's always "just a joke". They've been doing that since the 1940s.

    Take them at their word. You'll be glad you did.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Which is ironic given that one of the defining characteristics of right wing conservatives is that their word is worthless and they see it as their natural moral right.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @06:00PM (#60622794)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • LARP and Alternate Reality (Score:5, Informative)

    by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @06:12PM (#60622832)

    LARP and Alternate Reality Games are two different things.

    In a nutshell, LARP is nerds dressing up as elves and orks and hitting each other with rubber foams. (as I said, in a nutshell...)

    Alternate Reality games are (or were - the ones I heard from were all the rage in the early 2000s) something diferent. Instead of people pretending to be in a fantasy worls, it's a fantasy story comming to your real world, Ususally by receiving the story bits as part of email dialogs in your regular email account and having clues hidden on internet pages lokking loke regular pages and to "play" and solve puzzles you have to reply to those messages, or do research on Google/Wikipedia. Some games left mails on your phone mailbox.

  • governing with "Reality Show stars" and LARP players. Yeah, that's ought to work out real well. "Alternate facts" indeed.

  • Chatbots are pretty good these days and the Q stream is hopeless enough that it's better if most posts don't make actual sense. Train your bot on the right content and it could be pretty good at re-hashing random conspiracy theory garbage. If it gets enough followers then the additional anon posts become more source material for learning, with an end game being that the people following it are actually the only contributors, they just don't quite realise it. It would become this bizarre human-computer recyc

  • Gone wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LeeLynx ( 6219816 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @09:55PM (#60623372)
    I think from the point of view of 8chan people, it's a game gone amazingly right.

  • This summary is as incoherent as QAnon itself. Hey, let's throw together a bunch of speculations and connect them in some semi-coherent manner.

  • Religions (Score:2, Insightful)

    by felixrising ( 1135205 )
    And now we see just how religions get started. People will vehemently commit to and believe in made up and demonstrably false ideas. People really will believe anything and then defend to their death their own delusions. This is a case study in how easy these things get started. Maybe with the exception of the Flying Spaghetti Monster... But Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, et al..
  • QAnon is taken on faith by the believers, and doubted by most others. There is no longer any way to absolutely disprove QAnon from being an actual credentialed person, and this works to the favor of whoever is writing the QAnon posts. Even if the person / people behind QAnon came out this afternoon and announced it was a hoax the whole time, some believers would find reasons to brush that off.

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