  Online fringe communities offer fertile grounds for users seeking and sharing
ideas fueling suspicion of mainstream news and conspiracy theories. Among
these, the QAnon conspiracy theory emerged in 2017 on 4chan, broadly supporting
the idea that powerful politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities are closely
engaged in a global pedophile ring. Simultaneously, governments are thought to
be controlled by "puppet masters," as democratically elected officials serve as
a fake showroom of democracy.
  This paper provides an empirical exploratory analysis of the QAnon community
on Voat.co, a Reddit-esque news aggregator, which has captured the interest of
the press for its toxicity and for providing a platform to QAnon followers.
More precisely, we analyze a large dataset from /v/GreatAwakening, the most
popular QAnon-related subverse (the Voat equivalent of a subreddit), to
characterize activity and user engagement. To further understand the discourse
around QAnon, we study the most popular named entities mentioned in the posts,
along with the most prominent topics of discussion, which focus on US politics,
Donald Trump, and world events. We also use word embeddings to identify
narratives around QAnon-specific keywords. Our graph visualization shows that
some of the QAnon-related ones are closely related to those from the Pizzagate
conspiracy theory and so-called drops by "Q." Finally, we analyze content
toxicity, finding that discussions on /v/GreatAwakening are less toxic than in
the broad Voat community.
