Ethical Considerations in QAnon Authorship Attribution Research

Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

Why work on QAnon? Specificities and social impact

Who is Q? The theories put to test

Authorship attribution

Results

Discussion

Corpus constitution

Quotes of authors outside of the corpus have been

Definition of two subcorpus: dealing with generic difference and an imbalanced dataset

The genre of “Q drops”: a methodological challenge

Detecting style changes: rolling stylometry

Ethical statement, Acknowledgements, and References

Ethical statement

Even if written independently, this study tried to abide as much as possible to the principles of the “Pratiquer une recherche int`egre et responsable” guide by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’s ethics board (Comit´e d’´ethique du CNRS, 2017). This article does not reveal the identity of individuals that were not broadly known beforehand. In this case, all candidate authors were already either public figures, or individuals whose identity had been stated in major media outlets (NBC, HBO etc.). It only uses information that was in conscience made publicly available by the candidate authors and was accessible through standard internet searches at the time of data collection.

For ethical reasons and to respect the privacy policy of the platforms studied here, we do not freely release any content studied here. To respect the data sharing and open data principles, we however detail our data collection method, which should be sufficient to ensure reproducibility in most cases. Some contents could not be available anymore when an attempt at reproducing our computations is performed. In that case, these missing materials could be delivered to research teams on request.

We choose to designate the candidates we study only by their first name and initial, not to impact internet searches on their names.

Finally, we remind that this paper does not assert in any way that other persons outside of the persons studied here could not have written the Q drops.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank David D. Kirkpatrick from the New York Times and Frederick Brennan for their help during this investigation. Errors remain our own. Funding: no funding was used for this research. Data and materials availability: Code is available on Zenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6164620. Data available on request.

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