  The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) blood-thirsty
politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By
interpreting cryptic "drops" of information from an anonymous insider calling
themself Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that Donald Trump is
leading them in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been covered
extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in multiple
violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US
Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little understanding
of how the theory evolved and spread on the Web, and the role played in that by
multiple platforms.
  To address this gap, we study QAnon from the perspective of "Q" themself. We
build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected from six "aggregation
sites," which curate and archive them from their original posting to anonymous
and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites have a relatively low
(overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be
considered apocryphal. We then analyze the Q drops' contents to identify topics
of discussion and find statistically significant indications that drops were
not authored by a single individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit
are used to disseminate Q drops to wider audiences. We find that dissemination
was (initially) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed
moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the "gospel" of Q persists
on the Web.
