We know a little bit more about the mysterious figure who, years ago, converted - and still does - millions of Americans to his conspiracy theory, and recently galvanized followers of Donald Trump who took storming Congress.
Behind “Q”, the anonymous person behind the “QAnon” movement, are in fact hiding two people, say experts from a Swiss start-up.
OrphAnalytics, which first developed algorithms to chase away plagiarism, but which has since extended its field of expertise, put them to work to try to unravel the secret of “QAnon”.
"The conclusions are that we have two different authors at two different periods", explains Claude-Alain Roten, during an interview at his home in western Switzerland, whose address he wishes to keep a secret. 'obvious security reasons.
Two writers of conspiratorial messages
The conspiracy movement was born in October 2017 on the online forum 4Chan (and later 8Kun) and fed on messages called "Q-drops", baselessly claiming that Donald Trump was waging a secret war against a clique of pedophile Democrats and worshipers of Satan.
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Treated at first with disdain, QAnon has become a powerful movement and, for Claude-Alain Roten, there is no doubt: the thousands of cryptic messages are made by two people.
“The approach we use is stylometry, but the one we focused on is stylometry of sequences, strings of characters.
We are not trying to get out of properties on linguistic units like words or turns of sentences or syntax.
We are looking for information on the characteristics that characterize a string of characters, ”explains Claude-Alain Roten.
Analyzes of character strings
For OrphAnalytics, it is a question of exploiting the statistics of appearance of character strings to determine the authors of a text.
The small business can intervene as well on the authentication of a will, as to detect plagiarism and contribute to police investigations.
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The interest in QAnon comes from the concern of the founder of the company about the manipulation of the population of a country where he lived for three years.
Claude-Alain Roten is in fact a biologist by training.
But he changed his specialty when he realized that the methods used to decipher genetic codes could help detect the specifics of a person's writing style.
"I have the impression of always doing the same job", he confides.
“Convincing” work
A colleague, gray hair and a cloth mask, who asks that he only be identified as René, demonstrates on a computer perched on the dining room table.
After removing the slag that could jam the "signal" of some 4,950 "Q-drops", he passes them through the home software and on the screen clearly appear two separate sets.
"The difference in the signal is large enough to leave little doubt about the copyright change," according to a report released last month by the company.
For Florian Cafiero, CNRS researcher specializing in quantitative linguistics, the work of the Swiss on QAnon "seems convincing".
The stylometry revolution
If stylometry has been around for a long time, it has been revolutionized - like many other fields - by the advent of machines capable of processing phenomenal amounts of data.
OrphAnalytics has already hit the headlines by throwing itself into the fray over the Elena Ferrante affair, which rocked the literary world in Italy, claiming that the pseudonym author was in fact an author: Domenico Starnone.
The start-up, born in 2014, would also have been involved in criminal investigations, such as the case of the murder of little Gregory Villemin in France.
But Claude Alain Roten refuses to confirm or deny.
For him, his approach based on pure statistical analysis allows him to remain neutral where context and hypotheses are generally pillars of text analysis.
Florian Cafiero believes that this new way of approaching a proven technique and applying it to the legal process can help "avoid mistakes".
But he also expresses his fear that this type of technology will allow whistleblowers to be unmasked, for example.
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“As with all technology there is a bright side and a dark side”, recognizes Claude-Alain Roten, while emphasizing the strict ethical rules that his company applies in order to avoid “that our approach to sequence stylometry does not be used to serve the dark side ”.
As for the investigation into QAnon, he feels compelled to help lift a corner of the veil.
“We are responsible people.
If we can act, we act ”.