This webpage contains the dictionary "QAnon Canon" capturing insider language of the QAnon conspiracy discussion community across five dimensions of QAnon social imaginaries. This dictionary is build from extensive qualitative investigation of Q-posts, posts made by Q on image boards, and quantitative analysis of the discourse in the QAnon community. Specifically, we used 2166 Q-posts from 4chan and 8chan and 1.2 M contributions in 12 QAnon discussion subreddits on Reddit.
The QAnon Canon lexicon comprises of 403 words and phrases popular inside QAnon discussion communities relevant to five dimensions of QAnon social imaginaries - movement, expectations, practices, heroes, and foes. We are able to recover various expressions for named entities. For example, QAnon Canon contains multiple expressions for Hillary Clinton such as hillary, HRC, HC, killary, billary, alice in wonderland, clintons, and for Barack Obama Obama, Hussein, Obamas, ObamaHillaryCIA, Barack, Obummer, 0bama. QAnon Canon also captures lexically and semantically similar expressions of various phrases symbolizing the QAnon movement (q-team, q-analyst, q-research, q-clearance), knowledge construction practices inside QAnon (q-drops, qdrops, q drops, qposts, q-posts) and expectations set by Q (layoffs, mass exodus).
The symbolic, insider language captured in QAnon Canon can help in understanding how members of QAnon discussion groups create, develop, and propagate shared meanings that sustain their conspiracy worldview and group identity. Please refer to the full paper for detailed method description for building QAnon Canon.
qanon_canon.json (download link): This file contains the QAnon Canon lexicon in the dictionary format where keys are the names of QAnon social imaginaries and the values are words and phrases representing the social imaginaries.
If you use QAnon Canon in your work, please cite: Shruti Phadke, Mattia Samory, Tanushree Mitra. 2021. Characterizing Social Imaginaries and Self-Disclosures of Dissonance in Online Conspiracy Discussion Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’ 21), (accepted Jul 2021).