key: cord-0284563-5r3u5rd2
authors: Engel, Kristen; Hua, Yiqing; Zeng, Taixiang; Naaman, Mor
title: Characterizing Reddit Participation of Users Who Engage in the QAnon Conspiracy Theories
date: 2022-03-14
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1145/3512900
sha: 13c9527d0a2aa06762d3ed57b1ac0587bfa94e2c
doc_id: 284563
cord_uid: 5r3u5rd2

Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work characterizes how Reddit users who have participated in QAnon-focused subreddits engage in activities on the platform, especially outside their own communities. Using a large-scale Reddit moderation action against QAnon-related activities in 2018 as the source, we identified 13,000 users active in the early QAnon communities. We collected the 2.1 million submissions and 10.8 million comments posted by these users across all of Reddit from October 2016 to January 2021. The majority of these users were only active after the emergence of the QAnon Conspiracy theory and decreased in activity after Reddit's 2018 QAnon ban. A qualitative analysis of a sample of 915 subreddits where the"QAnon-enthusiastic"users were especially active shows that they participated in a diverse range of subreddits, often of unrelated topics to QAnon. However, most of the users' submissions were concentrated in subreddits that have sympathetic attitudes towards the conspiracy theory, characterized by discussions that were pro-Trump, or emphasized unconstricted behavior (often anti-establishment and anti-interventionist). Further study of a sample of 1,571 of these submissions indicates that most consist of links from low-quality sources, bringing potential harm to the broader Reddit community. These results point to the likelihood that the activities of early QAnon users on Reddit were dedicated and committed to the conspiracy, providing implications on both platform moderation design and future research.

Widespread conspiracy theories may have detrimental impacts on our society, including reducing public trust in science [20] and government entities [30] , or radicalizing violent extremist groups [11, 21] . Among them, QAnon emerged as one of the most consequential movements spreading conspiracy theories in the U.S. in recent years. The QAnon conspiracies are rooted in a narrative suggesting that the world is operated by a group of powerful pedophiles and human traffickers [58] . Some tenets of this conspiracy are believed by at least 17% of Americans according to a poll published in December 2020 [27] . In June 2021, a terrorism bulletin issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation listed parts of the QAnon community as domestic violent extremists [44] .

Conspiracy theories have attracted an increasing amount of attention from the research community. Studies have analyzed language patterns of conspiracy-related discussions [25, 50, 62] , attributes that correlate with conspiracy group engagement [31, 51] , as well as circumstances that might foster conspiracy beliefs [16, 33, 42, 67, 68] . In particular, because of the important consequences that it brings, recent work has focused on the QAnon movement on fringe social media websites [46] . However, most of the previous studies focus on the conspiracy theory, or the conspiracy group itself and its activities inside the group. An interesting question that was not as well addressed is how members of a conspiracy group interact with other online communities that are not dedicated to the movement.

In this short paper, we characterize the broader participation of users who had early involvement with QAnon on Reddit. Although the conspiracy has spread to many corners of the Internet [45] , Reddit was one of the first mainstream social media platforms that had a large QAnon population [76] . The social media platform is comprised of subreddits, communities of users who are interested in particular topics. In September 2018, Reddit banned a range of QAnon subreddits for policy violations [15] . We distinguish these QAnon subreddit bans from others by defining them as the 2018 QAnon ban. Specifically, we identified 19 QAnon-focused subreddits that were shut down by the moderation effort. We use this event to collect a set of users who were active in these banned subreddits. We define the 13,182 users who have posted submissions in these 19 QAnon-focused subreddits as Q-users. We further describe two important subsets of the Q-users. We define QAnon-enthusiastic users as the top 25% most active Q-users; authors who have published five or more submissions in the 19 QAnon-focused subreddits. There are 3,506 such QAnon-enthusiastic users. We refer to the remaining 9,676 users who do not meet the threshold as QAnon-interested users. We collected all the 2.1 million submissions and 10.8 million comments of all Q-users on Reddit, from October 28th, 2016, one year prior to the first Q drop [74, 75] , to January 23rd, 2021, 72 hours after the U.S. Presidential Inauguration.

With this data, we first characterize activity patterns of Q-users in relation to the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy and to the 2018 QAnon ban. We show that the majority of these users were significantly more active on Reddit during the period between the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy and the 2018 QAnon ban, as compared to the period before the emergence, and the period after the ban. Chandrasekharan et. al. [13] have shown that community bans are effective on Reddit in terms of reducing platform participation of users from the banned subreddits. Our findings validate this result, and indicate that the tendency of Q-users' participation, at least in the early period of the movement, was driven by their interest in the QAnon conspiracy.

Looking more generally at the activity of Q-users beyond their community, we analyzed the other subreddits where they were active. To this end, we sampled 915 out of the 12,987 subreddits where at least two QAnon-enthusiastic users have authored submissions. We categorized the sampled subreddits according to the topics that they focus on and the relation of these subreddits to the QAnon conspiracy. Our results indicate that the majority of subreddits that Q-users concentrate activity in focus on content sympathetic towards the QAnon conspiracy, such as pro-Trump rhetoric or centering unconstricted behavior, such as hate speech, pro-freedom of speech, and anti-establishment discourse. In particular, our results show that more activity had shifted to these types of subreddits after the 2018 QAnon ban.

Finally, we characterize the type of participation and harmful content posted by Q-users across different communities. We qualitatively analyzed 1,571 submissions from these users, sampled from the categorized subreddits. Our findings suggest that Q-users might have influence on other subreddits, by acting as moderators, sometimes in subreddits that are of topics that are misaligned with the QAnon conspiracy. The majority of the harmful content these users post across communities contain links to low-quality sources. Surprisingly, very few of the submissions that we sampled were characterized as negative interactions and hate speech, even when Q-users post in subreddits where users are likely to hold opposite views.

Our findings provide better understanding on the consequential QAnon conspiracy movement, as well as on how the early, dedicated members of that conspiracy community interact with a broader audience. The discoveries may also help inform platform moderators to take stronger actions to prevent further harms.

The QAnon conspiracy has received significant recent research attention, including its activity on Reddit and other social media. We provide some relevant background on the QAnon conspiracy community and its relation with Reddit. We then review related work that examine conspiracy theories, in particular QAnon's activities on social media, as well as work on the efficacy of deplatforming deviant communities.

The QAnon conspiracy theory and Reddit. The QAnon conspiracy theory refers to a series of narratives that emerged in October 2017, when an anonymous poster known as "Q" posted what became known as "Q drops" [74, 75] on the fringe image-board website 4chan [7] . The core of the conspiracy theory asserts that former U.S. President Trump would use his executive powers to arrest a cabal comprised of pedophiliac Satan-worshiping elites from Hollywood to the U.S. Government [58] . Since its inception, despite failed prophecies and a lack of supporting evidence, the QAnon conspiracy has evolved to incorporate a more expansive and sometimes conflicting set of conspiracies. These theories center around a supposed "deep state" and a "global elite" and range from predictions, such as the re-emergence of a deceased John F. Kennedy Jr., to responses to current events, such as claims of election fraud and the "plandemic" [59, 66, 72] . According to the Pew Research Center [69] , by September 2020, 47% of the Americans have heard of the conspiracy theory. A separate survey conducted in December 2020 shows that 37% of the Americans were unsure whether QAnon was true or false while 17% believed in some of its tenets [27] . QAnon adherents are feared to threaten and incite violence [15, 19, 37, 53] and are listed by U.S. law enforcement to be tied to domestic violent extremism [44] . After QAnon's success in propagating on fringe platforms, a community was created on Reddit in December 2017 to focus on QAnon discussions [71] . Reddit, a mainstream social media platform, consists of over two-million topic-focused content generating and sharing communities, known as subreddits. Users can make submissions, or comment on other users' submissions in subreddits. On September 12, 2018, Reddit banned several QAnon subreddit communities in response to repeated violations of the site's Content Policy [15] . Reporting suggested that the 2018 QAnon ban was successful in terms of reducing QAnon narratives on Reddit [70] .

Conspiracy communities on social media. Social media clearly contributes to the accelerated propagation of conspiracy content. The algorithms create echo-chambers that promote conspiracy theories [22] . Platforms foster trust within social circles [4, 24] that spread rumors, and support the human nature to bond through collective sense-making and gossip [32] . Prior work examining conspiracy communities on Reddit have focused on language patterns [50, 62, 63] and user engagement inside the conspiracy communities [61] . Most related to our research, Phadke et. al. [51] studied factors that might draw Reddit users into conspiracy groups, including interacting with current members of the conspiracy group. While their work focuses on predictors for engagement within conspiracy communities, our study characterizes the engagement of a conspiracy community across Reddit.

Given its importance, a growing body of research focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, including characterizing the QAnon movement through analysis of Q drops and QAnon user social imaginaries [3, 50] . Researchers have explored QAnon users within fringe [45] and instant messaging-based social media [26] , and examined the cross-platform movement from fringe to mainstream social media [18] . Previous work has also pointed out that social media platforms not only contribute to disseminating QAnon content that incites or leads to violence [5] , but also support the movement's collective sense-making [47] . Different from prior work, we focus on QAnon users' behaviors on a mainstream platform interacting with a diverse range of communities, and on how these users were impacted by the platform's moderation action.

The effectiveness of deplatforming. Prior work has shown that for social media websites, deplatforming is a powerful tool to reduce harmful behaviors on the platform [13, 28, 60] . However, users or communities that were deplatformed might move to alternative platforms [54, 57] and engage in more toxic behaviors [2, 55] . Nevertheless, on Reddit, researchers have examined platform-level actions such as subreddit quarantines [12, 64] and subreddit bans [13, 43, 60] , showing the effectiveness of both types of actions within the platform. Different from previous studies, we characterize QAnon users' participation on Reddit in other communities from a period before the creation of the QAnon-focused subreddits and through a period after the 2018 QAnon ban. Further, our study is not only focused on deplatforming effectiveness, as we are interested more generally in the activities of Q-users in other Reddit communities.

To better understand QAnon participants' activity patterns on Reddit, we collect a multi-part dataset. The core of our dataset consists of 2,099,875 submissions and 10,831,922 comments from 63,697 subreddits, posted by 13,182 Q-users identified from 19 banned QAnon-focused subreddits. This set of subreddits was not made public, but we explain how we extracted it below.

To find Q-users, we first had to identify the QAnon-focused subreddits. On September 12, 2018, Reddit coordinated a large-scale intervention against QAnon-focused subreddits for platform policy violations [15] . To list these impacted subreddits, we start from a large such community, which had been identified in media reports [15] as one of the banned communities: r/greatawakening. At the time of the 2018 QAnon ban, r/greatawakening had 12,862 submission authors and over 71,000 subscribers [15] . We use r/greatawakening as a seed community and search for subreddits that are of a similar user base. We search for all subreddits satisfying the following three conditions:

• The subreddit name contains at least one of the QAnon-associated terms 1 , which we identified from hashtags on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, converted to lowercase, and lemmatized. • The subreddit contains at least one submission within 45 days prior to the 2018 QAnon ban and no further activity after. In total, we identify 19 QAnon-focused subreddits, including r/greatawakening. The list of subreddits, number of submission authors, submissions, and reasons for the ban for each subreddit are listed in Table 2 in Appendix A.

Most of these discovered subreddits were small in size, with r/greatawakening containing over 18 times as many users as of the next largest community. The remaining 18 QAnon-focused subreddits have 78 submission authors on average. Using this set of 19 subreddits, we identify a total of 13,182 Q-users who have made at least one submission in any of the subreddits.

Given this initial set of users, we expand the dataset to include the Q-users' activities in other subreddits. We use the Pushshift API [6, 39] to collect all the comments and submissions of Q-users during a 50-month period. The data collection period starts on October 28th, 2016, one year prior to the first Q drop [74, 75] , and ends on January 23rd, 2021, 72 hours after the U.S. Presidential Inauguration. The 2021 inauguration was chosen as it was a significant event for the QAnon conspiracy movement, and marked the end of a period with potentially heightened activity and attention. In total, our dataset includes 2,099,875 submissions and 10,831,922 comments from 63,697 subreddits. We refer to the subset of 12,987 subreddits where at least two of the QAnon-enthusiastic users have made a submission as the QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits, which include 1,554,183 submissions and 9,687,789 comments made by Q-users.

In summary, our extensive dataset includes users who were active in QAnon-focused subreddits banned by Reddit, as well as the activity of these users in other communities for a period starting before the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy and continuing for years after the 2018 QAnon ban. The data are described and available on Github 2 .

Ethical considerations. Our work uses data in the public domain, collected through a publicly available APIs from Reddit and Pushshift. Further, the Pushshift API provides Reddit users with a mechanism to request to remove their account and its content from the dataset. We recognize that some users may not be aware that their data is accessible and used in this way, so we hashed usernames to further obscure identification. Additionally, we focused our analysis on the aggregation of the user base.

We first study the activity patterns of Q-users across all Reddit communities, and how these patterns changed with the emergence of QAnon conspiracy theory and the 2018 QAnon ban. For Q-users, the QAnon conspiracy theory may have motivated their participation on Reddit. On the other hand, moderation actions [13, 60] against them, such as the 2018 QAnon ban, may have a negative impact on their future participation. We analyze the basic account statuses and activity patterns of Q-users with unrestricted accounts, or existing accounts without limitations on participation. We obtain user account status (unrestricted, suspended, and does not exist) for all Q-users as of June 2021. We find that the majority of Q-users were significantly less active before the QAnon conspiracy theory emerged, indicating the possibility that the motivation of their participation on Reddit was heavily influenced by the conspiracy. Further, many of the Q-users, even those who stayed on the platform, decreased activity by a large extent after the 2018 QAnon ban by Reddit, likely due to the effect of moderation. We refer to the user's activity as the total number of submissions and comments by a Q-user in any subreddit. The Q period spans the 319 days between the first "Q drop" on 4chan, on October 28th, 2017 and the moderation action from Reddit to ban QAnon-focused subreddits on September 12, 2018. For ease of comparison, we use same-length before-and-after time periods for our analysis here. The pre-Q period spans the 319 days right before the Q period, beginning on December 13, 2016. The post-Q period spans the 319 days right after the Q period, ending on July 28, 2019. Table 1 shows the total number of QAnon-enthusiastic users and QAnon-interested users, as well as a June 2021 snapshot of the account status of the users in each group: the number of users from each group that are unrestricted, that do not have an existing account (indicates account deletion), or that are suspended (indicates a moderation intervention of account suspension or ban). Note that more of the QAnon-interested users were suspended (4.54%) compared to the QAnon-enthusiastic users (2.99%). The table indicates that among all the users who have unrestricted account status, majority of the users from both groups were not active before the emergence of Q (66.56% of the unrestricted QAnon-interested users and 70.85% of the unrestricted QAnon-enthusiastic users). After the 2018 QAnon ban, around one-third of these users disengaged with Reddit. For example, among the unrestricted QAnon-enthusiastic users, 66.52% of them remained active on Reddit.

While some Q-users were on Reddit before and after the Q period, we set to understand how Q-users' activity patterns differed before and after that period. We compare these users' activity in three consecutive time periods of equal length , the pre-Q, Q, and post-Q periods. Figure 1 shows a comparison of the relative activity of each user in the pre-Q period (a) and post-Q period (b) with that in the Q period. We restrict users to those who posted at least 5 submissions or comments in the Q period across all of Reddit, and whose account statuses were unrestricted at the time of our data collection, which consists of 58% of the QAnon-interested users and all of the QAnon-enthusiastic users. We use the ratio of activity between pre-(or post-) and the Q period; when users are more active in the Q period, that ratio will be smaller than 1 (on the left side of each figure) . The X-axis represents a range of user activity ratio, from 10 −4 to 10 3 and the Y-axis represents the cumulative percentage of Q-users with a given activity ratio. Most Q-users were significantly more active in the Q period. For example, looking at the pre-Q figure, and the X-axis at a user activity ratio of 10 −1 , we see that 63% and 78% of the QAnon-interested users and QAnon-enthusiastic users (respectively) were at least ten times more active in the Q period as compared to in the pre-Q period. Similarly, in the post-Q figure, 44% and 58% of the QAnon-interested users and QAnon-enthusiastic users (at a user activity ratio of 10 −1 ) were at least ten times more active in the Q period as compared to in the post-Q period. This result echos our observation in Table 1 , showing that many of the Q-users increased activity after the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The results also show that even if Q-users were still active on the platform, their activity decreased across Reddit after the 2018 QAnon ban.

Here we focus our analysis on where the Q-users were active on Reddit beyond the QAnon-focused subreddits throughout the 50-month study period. We use qualitative analysis to characterize the QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits, where at least two QAnon-enthusiastic users have published submissions. Our analysis is centered on QAnon-enthusiastic users, the most active Q-users, who contributed five or more submissions as defined above. Our results show that although the majority of the sampled QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits are of content unrelated to QAnon, the majority of activities of these users are concentrated in the communities that are sympathetic to or aligned with the QAnon narrative. In particular, their submissions are in the communities that cover topics that are supportive of Trump or about unconstricted behavior, such as hate speech, pro-freedom of speech, and anti-establishment. The submissions in QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits accounted for over 89% of all submissions by QAnon-enthusiastic users on Reddit during that period. In total, this activity amounts to 923,942 submissions by 2,636 QAnon-enthusiastic users in QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits during the study period. To understand the activities of these most active users we sample and categorize 915 QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits according to their topic, and the relation between the sampled subreddits with the QAnon conspiracy theory. The sample consists of communities with varying sizes and different estimated percentage of QAnon-enthusiastic users in the community.

Methods. We begin by sampling QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits for qualitative analysis. Our sampling strategy ensures that we cover subreddits with different types of engagement from the general public as well as that from QAnon-enthusiastic users. First, to ensure coverage of the subreddits where QAnon-enthusiastic users are most active, we sample the top 3% of the QAnonenthusiastic active subreddits with the most QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions. This set includes 390 subreddits, each with at least 125 submissions from QAnon-enthusiastic users. Second, we group the remaining QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits into five stratified bins, according to the number of subscribers that they have. We obtain subscriber counts using the Reddit API [9] as of June 2021. For private, quarantined, or banned subreddits, we use Metrics For Reddit [23] to retrieve the number of subscribers. For 88 (0.68% of all) subreddits, none of these were available, we use the median of all known subscriber counts of the QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits as an estimate. To estimate the levels of QAnon-enthusiastic users infiltration in subreddits, we compute the number of the subreddit's QAnon-enthusiastic users submission authors over the number of the subreddit's subscribers. Inside each of the five bins, we group the subreddits into three strata according to this ratio. To create our sample of subreddits, we randomly sample 35 subreddits from each of the fifteen (5 × 3) groups, yielding a set of 525 subreddits. Finally, we combine the set of subreddits from the top 3% and the set from the stratified random sampling to obtain a sample of 915 QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits, which includes 85% of the QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions and 58% of all Q-users' submissions in all QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits. We use an inductive thematic analysis [10] to understand the different content focuses and types of the subreddits in our sample. The analysis is based on key information of each subreddit: the subreddit name, public description, and the most recent top five upvoted "hot" designated submissions. Two authors independently reviewed the data and conducted four rounds of iterative coding and reconciliation to produce a subreddit codebook (Appendix A, Table 3 ). Two authors coded the sampled subreddits, each with one or more of the 24 codes. The Cohen's kappa for the this coding of the subreddits is 0.83. After this step, the two authors resolved conflicts in the code through discussion. We grouped the 24 codes in the book in two different dimensions: (1) nine topic labels derived from common subreddit themes; and (2) six relation labels representing the relationship of the subreddit with the QAnon narrative. The mapping of codes to relation and topic labels are detailed in the codebook (Appendix A, Table 4 and Table 5 , respectively). For example, subreddits with the codes conspiracy -other and politics -right are assigned a relation label of Sympathetic due to having similar views or supporting common QAnon themes. In addition to the relation label, subreddits with the code conspiracy -other were assigned a topic label of Unseen/unknown, capturing subreddits where the community speculates or searches for meaning and explanation of different phenomena (see Appendix A, Table 5 ). The code politics -right, to use another example, was assigned a topic label of Pro-Trump in addition to its relation label.

Topic labels. Figure 2 shows the analysis of sampled QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits according to their topic label. Figure 2(a) shows the count of subreddits in our sample where QAnonenthusiastic users were active during the entire 50-month study period, categorized by the topic labels. The X-axis represents the number of subreddits that contain the type of topic specified by the Y-axis. The figure shows that QAnon-enthusiastic users were broadly active: most of the sampled subreddits (629 out of 915) contain Unrelated topics (bottom row).

While QAnon-enthusiastic users were active in many different types of subreddits, most of them of Unrelated topics, the majority of their activity was focused on a number of subreddits with topics relevant to QAnon. In total, QAnon-interested users and QAnon-enthusiastic users posted 421,908 and 794,423 submissions in all sampled subreddits respectively. Figure 2( Figure 2 (c) shows the percentage of QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions before and after the 2018 QAnon ban over the entire study period, in subreddits with different types of topics. QAnon-enthusiastic users posted 397,752 and 396,671 submissions in these sampled subreddits before and after the 2018 QAnon ban. The X-axis represents the percentage of total submissions from one of the time periods specified by the legend. For example, the fourth row from top shows that 51% of the QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions before the ban (bar with lighter shade) and 52% of the QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions after the ban (bar with darker shade and stripes posted in subreddits that focus on Pro-Trump topics. Similarly, there is increased activity from QAnon-enthusiastic users after the ban on submissions in subreddits we labeled as Unconstricted behavior. The difference is significant ( 2 (8, = 1, 029, 581) = 20, 398.2, < 0.001).

In conclusion, our results indicate that although most of the QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits are of unrelated topics, the majority of the QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions are concentrated in subreddits with Pro-Trump and Unconstricted behavior content. After the 2018 QAnon ban, QAnonenthusiastic users' submissions in Unconstricted behavior-focused subreddits increased significantly while those in Pro-Trump-focused subreddits increased only slightly. One possible explanation for the shift being relatively minor could be the banning in June 2020 of the largest Pro-Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald, where 41.5% of QAnon-enthusiastic users authored submissions [41] .

Relation labels. Figure 3 shows the analysis of where QAnon-enthusiastic users were active in the sample according to the subreddits' relation labels, a direct evaluation of how the subreddit relates to the QAnon narrative. Figure 3 shows the percentage of submissions from the two user groups, QAnon-interested users and QAnon-enthusiastic users, in subreddits with different types of relations to the QAnon narrative. The X-axis represents the percentage of total submissions from one of the user group specified by the legend, that were posted in a subreddit with the type of relation specified by the Y-axis. Similar to our previous findings, most of the submissions from both groups are concentrated in subreddits that are Sympathetic towards QAnon (64% for QAnon-interested users and 76% of QAnon-enthusiastic users). Further, compared with QAnon-interested users, more of the QAnonenthusiastic users' submissions are in subreddits with QAnon-related topics that are Related (aligned) with the narrative (19% vs. 4%). The difference is significant ( 2 (5, = 1, 444, 019) = 56, 617.7, < 0.001). Figure 3 (c) shows the percentage of QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions before and after the 2018 QAnon ban, in subreddits with different types of relations. The X-axis represents the percentage of total submissions from one of the time periods specified by the legend, that were posted in a subreddit with the type of relation specified by the Y-axis. For example, the second row from top shows that 75% of the QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions before the ban (bar with lighter shade) and 77% of the QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions after the ban (bar with darker shade and stripes) were posted in Sympathetic subreddits. There's also an increase in the portion of the QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions after the ban in subreddits that are Related (aligned) to the QAnon narrative. The difference is significant ( 2 (5, = 1, 003, 887) = 20, 575.7, < 0.001).

Our findings show that the majority of QAnon-enthusiastic users' submissions are concentrated in subreddits that are Sympathetic towards the QAnon conspiracy theory, especially when compared with QAnon-interested users. After the 2018 QAnon ban, QAnon-enthusiastic users concentrated more in subreddits that share similar elements, views, or themes with QAnon, that were not directly misaligned with or focused on the conspiracy.

Q-users interact with different types of subreddits in different ways. One of the more concerning types of interactions is when these users serve as moderators of subreddits, where they can exert outsize influence on these communities. Another interaction that may be concerning is the posting of content that is harmful within these subreddits. In this section, we explore these two types of interactions. Our analysis shows that a non-trivial number of subreddits could potentially be heavily influenced by Q-users who were serving as their moderators. This phenomenon is not limited to subreddits that are of similar views or themes to QAnon, but is also extended to subreddits that promote opposing or disjointed content. Our results below also show that Q-users spread low-quality information across all other subreddit types, although we detected less such activity in subreddits that are Unrelated to QAnon.

Q-users as moderators. We examine the different types and characteristics of the QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits where Q-users act as moderators. We obtain the moderator names as of June 2021 using the Reddit API [9] . In total, out of 12,987 QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits, we found that 88 QAnon-interested users and 143 QAnon-enthusiastic users are moderators of 113 and 371 subreddits, nine of which have over 1,000,000 subscribers including r/worldnews and r/politics. In particular, 240 of these subreddits have moderation teams solely comprised of Q-users. Figure 4 (a) shows the number of QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits with at least one Q-user as moderator (Y-axis) by number of subscribers that these subreddits have (X-axis). The legend separates QAnon-interested users (bar with the lighter shade) and QAnon-enthusiastic users (bar with the darker shade and stripes.) For example, the first column from left shows that most of the QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits (251) that have QAnon-enthusiastic users as moderators are small communities, with fewer than 100 subscribers. At the same time, several larger communities with more than 10,000 subscribers have moderators who are QAnon-interested users (62 subreddits, first bar with the lighter shade from right) or QAnon-enthusiastic users (28 subreddits, first bar with the darker shade and stripes from right). These numbers indicate that both QAnon-enthusiastic users and QAnon-interested users might have large impact on the broader community and conversation on Reddit.

To understand the types of subreddits where these users serve as moderators, we examine our sample of 915 QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits (as described as in Section 5). Within this sample, we find that 38 QAnon-enthusiastic users are moderators of 69 of these subreddits, and 31 QAnon-interested users serve as moderators of 29 of the 915. Furthermore, 25 of the 915 sampled subreddits have moderation teams solely comprised of Q-users. Figure 4(b) and (c) break down the types of subreddits moderated by these users according to the topic labels and relation labels (Y-axis) respectively. The X-axis represents the number of subreddits moderated by QAnon-enthusiastic users for each type of relation and topic label. For example, in Figure 4 (c), the majority of the subreddits with QAnon-enthusiastic users as moderators are Sympathetic to the QAnon conspiracy theory (35 subreddits, second column from top.) However, as shown in Figure 4(b) , there are cases where QAnon-enthusiastic users moderate subreddits with topics that are not clearly aligned with the QAnon narratives, such as Current events (9 subreddits), Unseen/unknown (20 subreddits), or even subreddits with topics that are clearly misaligned with the QAnon narratives, such as Anti-Trump (8 subreddits).

In total, the Q-users made 1,554,183 submissions in the 12,987 QAnonenthusiastic active subreddits over the 50-month study period. To better understand what type of harmful content Q-users post in other subreddits than the QAnon-focused ones, especially inside the QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits, we apply a labeling scheme to a sample of 1,571 Q-userauthored submissions. These submissions are extracted from the 915 sampled QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits.

We used a stratified random sampling strategy to obtain the submissions sample in order to ensure a balance across subreddit relation labels and subreddit topics. For each relation label and topic label pair, we sample a number of submissions is proportional to the number of subreddits labeled with both and . In total, we sample 1,571 submissions made by Q-users in the sample of 915 QAnon-enthusiastic active subreddits. The 1,571 sampled submissions were assigned one or more labels indicating if the post contained different types of harmful content: QAnon conspiracy, Conspiracy-politics, Conspiracy-other, Hate speech, Negative interaction, and Low-quality source. We expand on these labels in Appendix A, Table 6 . Two authors independently reviewed and labeled the submissions. If a post did not contain one of these pre-defined harms, it was labeled Unrelated. To apply the Low-quality source label we use Media Bias Fact Check [14] (MBFC, accessed June 2021), a resource frequently used in previous work [49, 65, 77] . The authors labeled a link submission as a Low-quality source if it was labeled by MBFC as low credibility, mixed, low or very low factual reporting, questionable sources, or conspiracy-psuedoscience. In total, 55% of the unique links in our sample were included in MBFC. The Cohen's kappa for labeling was 0.53, followed by a reconciliation process that produced the final labels used in the analysis.

To understand where Q-users promoted harmful content, we examine these labeled submissions across different types of subreddit. Figure 5 shows the different types of submissions posted by Qusers in subreddits of (a) different topic labels and (b) different relation labels. The Y-axis represents the percentage of the different types of submissions. The submission types are the columns, using different shades of blue for each type as specified in the legend. The percentage is the ratio of this type of submission out of all the sampled submissions for that category of subreddits. For example, in subreddits Related (neutral), Related (misaligned), and Unrelated to QAnon narratives, the majority of the submissions are labeled Unrelated (do not contain harmful content). As is clear from the figure, the submission behavior of Q-users differ in different types of subreddits, and the differences between subreddits are significant in both plots ( 2 (30, = 1, 571) = 897, < 0.001 and 2 (48, = 1, 571) = 1, 086, < 0.001). In the QAnon subreddits, the most common type of the submissions (34%) are of QAnon conspiracy. However, in subreddits with Sympathetic and those with Related (aligned) relation labels (the second and third group of columns from left in Figure 5 (a)), the majority (55% and 65% respectively) of the submissions by these users are of Low-quality source (third darkest shade). In particular, these Low-quality source content submissions make up a large portion of Q-users' submissions in subreddits labeled with different topics as well. As shown in Figure 5(b) , subreddits that are about Current events, Pro-Trump, and Unconstricted behavior contain 46%, 61%, 67% Low-quality source submissions, respectively. Interestingly, in departure from the findings of previous research [17, 34] , Negative interactions constituted only a small portion of the sampled Q-users' submissions (less than 10% for all types of the subreddits). Overall, our results indicate that Q-users tend to spread low-quality information in the broader community, causing harm in Reddit communities at large. This finding is especially concerning as some of the communities they are active in are focused on current events, such as discussions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this paper, we use the 2018 QAnon ban event as a source of information about early users dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy. We identify QAnon-focused subreddits on Reddit and users who were active in these communities. We then characterize the activities of these early QAnon users beyond their these communities, from a year before the emergence of the conspiracy theory to 72 hours after the 2021 U.S. Presidential Inauguration. Our analyses provide the first clues towards understanding whether these users are "casual conspiracists" who participate in conspiracy-related conversations occasionally and have a regular presence in other communities, or "committed conspiracists" who join the platform only to participate in the activities that are related the conspiracy. The findings point towards the latter. We discuss these findings below, and review the limitations of this work.

While not focused on the efficacy or outcomes of the ban, our findings echo some of the earlier results on the effect of community bans. Previous research [13, 60] has shown that Reddit bans were effective in reducing participation from users of the banned communities and preventing some harmful behaviors. Our data and findings suggest that the 2018 QAnon ban has similar effects on the early Q-users community. We show that most of the Q-users accounts we could observe stopped being active or significantly decreased their activity after the ban. Further, a higher percentage of accounts from QAnon-enthusiastic users relative to QAnon-interested users no longer exist, implying account deletion by the most active in the QAnon-focused subreddits. One unexpected finding was the higher percentage of banned or suspended QAnon-interested users relative to QAnon-enthusiastic users. In the absence of metadata or other mechanisms to understand the reasons for account suspension, future work could consider the final posts of these users to uncover whether or not the moderation intervention was related to their QAnon association.

While most researchers have tracked the activities of banned community members after [2, 28, 43, 54, 56, 57, 60] the ban or right before the ban [13] , our analysis goes earlier in the existence of these communities to show that the majority of the Q-users likely joined Reddit to engage in and focus on QAnon-related activities. This finding extends our understanding of conspiracist behavior on Reddit, and provides a recommendation for future works to study the other aspects of the participation of active members prior to the creation of the later-banned communities, or in parallel to their activities there. One particular research question that this result raises is of the association between the success of a community ban and the degree of its participants engaging with other communities on the site.

Our analyses on the more-active Q-users show that while these users were involved in other communities, they concentrated their participation in subreddits with similar viewpoints. Previous research had examined inter-community interactions and conflicts between communities, including on Reddit. Besides some of the interactions shown in previous work, like coordinated hate attacks [38] and toxic conversations [17, 34] , we have shown that the Q-users also engage in other types of harmful behaviors when interacting with communities that are of misaligned topics, such as propagating mis-and disinformation from low-quality sources and spreading conspiracy theories. At the same time, despite the majority of QAnon-focused subreddits being banned for harassment (Appendix A, Table 2 ), we have found only a small percentage of Q-users' submissions contain negative interactions and hate speech. According to our results, 7% and 0.6% of the sampled submissions by these users are labeled Negative interaction and Hate speech respectively. Nevertheless, as Q-users made 1,554,183 submissions in the nearly 13,000 subreddits in which they were active over the 50-month study period, this would mean that there were over 118,000 submissions with negative interaction or hate speech content, a large amount that could still have significant impact on the broader community. This finding of somewhat limited proportion of negative interaction and hate speech could be a result of our sample, or the fact that our analysis only focused on Reddit submissions, not taking comments into account. It is likely that there is more harassment happening in comments posted by Q-users. A more in depth comparison of Q-users' content, submissions and comments included, could be an area of future work.

There are other ways in which these users can impact the overall Reddit community. As we report above, our results indicate that several of the Q-users act as moderators of non-QAnon subreddits. Content moderation plays an important role on Reddit, with moderators often having outsized influence on the content posted [29, 40] . It is important for future work to understand what is the Q-users' impact on those communities and what harms to our information ecosystem may be caused by this kind of involvement creates.

Our study focused on Reddit communities and early, committed adopters of the QAnon conspiracy theory on the platform. On other social media platforms, even those that offer similar "community" structures, different platform affordances enable different types of user expressions [35, 52, 73] . For example, Facebook groups also support community discussions. However, unlike Reddit, people can be added to groups, and group activities are well integrated -often driven by -Facebook's existing social graph [36] . Such features might lead to more nuances when analyzing QAnon adherents' behaviors on Facebook [8] . Further, community migrations caused by deplatforming [2, 13, 56] raise interesting questions of how QAnon users may exploit the affordances of various platforms. The activities of QAnon community members beyond their community boundaries in other social media platforms and across multiple platforms is another area of future work.

Nevertheless, the patterns of community and content engagement we see on Reddit might resemble that of QAnon user interactions with the broader information ecosystem in other places, online and offline. For example, recent studies of Twitter activities around the 2020 U.S. elections [1, 48] have shown that on Twitter, the QAnon community forms a tight network community. Echoing our findings, showing that Reddit QAnon users engage in large amount of the activities within sympathetic subreddits, the QAnon community on Twitter is also quite integrated with other alt-right and extremist groups [1, 48] holding sympathetic views towards QAnon. We believe that our dataset and analyses may add knowledge to the growing research body on understanding the online alt-right activities (e.g. [1, 45, 46, 56] ), and help researchers from multiple disciplines better understand this consequential movement.

Limitations. Our analysis suffers from several limitations worth considering here, beyond the focus on Reddit and its limited generalization to other platforms. First, our observational data cannot be used to interpret causal relations among the observed actions. For example, QAnon-enthusiastic users increased participation in Sympathetic subreddits post-ban relative to their pre-ban activity. Given how the data is presented, this might be interpreted as a result of the 2018 QAnon ban. However, there could be other explanations, such as an increase in political subreddit submissions discussing U.S. elections which also occurred during the study period. Further, we note some limits on data collection. For example, we could not retrieve the subreddit metadata from subreddits that are currently banned, quarantined, or private. This limit may have impacted our data analysis in ways that are hard to estimate. Finally, we used the 2018 QAnon ban event and the QAnon-focused subreddits to derive the set of Q-users we built on in this work. There are other Reddit users who are interested in the QAnon discussions, whose behaviors are not fully captured and analyzed in these results, as we only consider a specific subset of communities. An opposite phenomena may have also impacted our results: there could also be non-QAnon members who authored submissions in the subreddits being used to derive Q-users, leading us to include such accounts in the analysis. However, we estimate that the likelihood of such inclusion is low.

We focus our work on the consequential QAnon conspiracy theory and in particular its early, dedicated users, those who engaged in the QAnon movement before 2018. We characterized these users' participation on Reddit, especially outside of the QAnon-focused subreddits. We collected a large-scale dataset of Reddit activities from identified QAnon users. Our results indicate that the majority of these early QAnon users were only active on Reddit after the emergence of the QAnon conspiracy theory and decreased in activity after Reddit's 2018 QAnon ban. Our qualitative analysis further shows that the more active QAnon users engage with a wide range of subreddits focusing on various topics, that are of different relations to the QAnon conspiracy theory. However, the majority of these users' submissions were concentrated in subreddits that hold sympathetic attitudes towards QAnon, including topics that are supportive of Trump or unconstricted behaviors. These submissions often include links from low-quality sources, potentially propagating mis-and disinformation. We also found that some of the early QAnon users become moderators in subreddits, including those that are of topics that are misaligned with the QAnon narrative. These results improve our understandings of the QAnon community and their potential influence on the broader Reddit ecosystem, providing insights for both future researchers and platform providers. 

VoterFraud2020: a Multi-modal Dataset of Election Fraud Claims on Twitter

Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks

The gospel according to Q: Understanding the QAnon conspiracy from the perspective of canonical information

The psychology of rumor

The QAnon conspiracy theory: A security threat in the making

The pushshift reddit dataset

4chan and/b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

Covid-19 conspiracy theories: QAnon, 5G, the New World Order and other viral ideas

Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW)

Using thematic analysis in psychology

Suspicious minds: Why we believe conspiracy theories

Quarantined! Examining the Effects of a Community-Wide Moderation Intervention on Reddit

You Can't Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit's 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech

Media Bias Fact Check. 2021. Search and Learn the Bias of News Media

Reddit bans Qanon subreddits after months of violent threats

Who views online extremism? Individual attributes leading to exposure

Extracting inter-community conflicts in reddit

Accused Mob Boss Killer Followed QAnon, Thought He Had President Trump's Support, Filing Says

The psychology of conspiracy theories

Understanding conspiracy theories

A Longitudinal Analysis of YouTube's Promotion of Conspiracy Videos

Rumor cascades

Changing conceptions of conspiracy

Anja Feldmann, and Savvas Zannettou. 2021. On the Globalization of the QAnon Conspiracy Theory Through Telegram

More than 1 in 3 Americans believe a 'deep state' is working to undermine Trump

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter

Through the looking glass: Study of transparency in Reddit's moderation practices

The impact of exposure to media messages promoting government conspiracy theories on distrust in the government: Evidence from a two-stage randomized experiment

Pathways to conspiracy: The social and linguistic precursors of involvement in Reddit's conspiracy theory forum

Conspiracy Talk on Social Media: Collective Sensemaking during a Public Health Crisis

Events and controversies: Influences of a shocking news event on information seeking

Community interaction and conflict on the web

The research politics of social media platforms

When do people trust their social groups

Man pleads guilty to terrorism charge after blocking Hoover Dam bridge with armored truck

You Know What to Do": Proactive Detection of YouTube Videos Targeted by Coordinated Hate Attacks

Python Pushshift.io API Wrapper (PSAW)

What Just Happened on Reddit? Understanding The Moderator Blackout

Reddit Bans Popular Forum for Donald Trump Supporters

Credibility and the Dynamics of Collective Attention

User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest

Adherence to QAnon Conspiracy Theory by Some Domestic Violent Extremists

Is it a Qoincidence?": An Exploratory Study of QAnon on Voat

Raiders of the lost kek: 3.5 years of augmented 4chan posts from the politically incorrect board

The Construction Of Alternative Facts: Dark Participation And Knowledge Production In The QAnon Conspiracy

The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election

A link-based approach to detect media bias in news websites

Characterizing Social Imaginaries and Self-Disclosures of Dissonance in Online Conspiracy Discussion Communities

What Makes People Join Conspiracy Communities? Role of Social Factors in Conspiracy Engagement

Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook

FBI says followers of QAnon conspiracy theory could engage in "violent action

Deplatforming the far-right: An analysis of YouTube and BitChute

Does Platform Migration Compromise Content Moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels

Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube

Deplatforming: Following extreme Internet celebrities to Telegram and alternative social media

What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory?

QAnon emerges as recurring theme of criminal cases tied to US Capitol siege

The aftermath of disbanding an online hateful community

Conspiracies online: User discussions in a conspiracy community following dramatic events

The Government Spies Using Our Webcams' The Language of Conspiracy Theories in Online Discussions

Conspiracy in the time of corona: automatic detection of emerging COVID-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news

The discourse of online content moderation: Investigating polarized user responses to changes in reddit's quarantine policy

Understanding high-and low-quality URL Sharing on COVID-19 Twitter streams

How Covid-19 myths are merging with the QAnon conspiracy theory

Examining the alternative media ecosystem through the production of alternative narratives of mass shooting events on Twitter

Media use, social structure, and belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

The Pew Research Center. 2020. Five facts about the QAnon conspiracy theories

Reddit Squashed QAnon by Accident

Why some QAnon believers think JFK Jr is still alive -and about to become vice president

The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media

We analyzed every message ever posted by 'Q,' the enigmatic persona that started the QAnon conspiracy theory

QAnon -Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

How three conspiracy theorists took 'Q' and sparked Qanon

Recovery: A multimodal repository for covid-19 news credibility research

We thank Nicola Dell for her consultation on this project. This material is based upon work partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grants SaTC-2120651 and IIS-1840751.