"Is it a Qoincidence?": A First Step Towards Understanding and Characterizing the QAnon Movement on Voat.co (pizzagate)

submitted ago by Mil_Spec

Patriots. You are being watched.

Words matter. Language matters.

Mods, consider your own words, and the impact that it has on discussion and tone.

Optics Matter, Slurs Detract.

-Monkey

https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04885

In this work, we focus on characterizing the QAnon movement on this http URL [Voat.co]. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that supports the idea that powerful politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities are closely engaged in a pedophile ring. At the same time, many governments are controlled by the "puppet masters" where the democratically elected officials serve as a fake showroom of democracy. Voat, a 5-year-old news aggregator, captured the interest of many journalists because of the often hateful content its users' post. Hence, we collect data from seventeen QAnon related subverses to characterize the narrative around QAnon, detect the most prominent topics of discussion, and showcase how the different topics and terms used in QAnon related subverses are interconnected.

PDF WARNING

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04885

notable sections:

Notably, we relied on a word2vec model to illustrate the connection of different terms to closely related words. We found that the terms "qanon" and "q" are closely related to other conspiracy theories like "pizzagate"

Last we attempt to showcase how racist these communities tend to be, motivated by the slurs we detect in the word2vec model vocabulary and in the topic modeling we performed in Section 5.1. We now calculate the cosine similarity of the terms "nigger," and "jew."

By looking at Table 6, it is clear that the term "nigger" is associated with many hateful slurs like "kike" (a contemptuous term used to refer to a person of the Jewish religion or descent) "faggot" and "filthy"

As hypothesized, the term "jew" is closely related to words associated with the holocaust, and the terms "masters," and "puppet" which suggests that indeed the users in these communities blame people of the Jewish religion or descent for corrupting their government, and leading the "deep state"

Alarmingly, we found that only one user authored about 30% of the total submissions posted in the most active subverse

Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding.

Proverbs 17:27

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ORDOTEMPLIINTERNETIS ago

Word2vec is a technique for natural language processing.The word2vec algorithm uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text. Once trained, such a model can detect synonymous words or suggest additional words for a partial sentence.wiki

This model was trained on the Google News vocab, which you can import and play with. Contemplate, for a moment, that the Word2vec algorithm has never been taught a single rule of English syntax. It knows nothing about the world, and is unassociated with any rules-based symbolic logic or knowledge graph. And yet it learns more, in a flexible and automated fashion, than most knowledge graphs will learn after many years of human labor. It comes to the Google News documents as a blank slate, and by the end of training, it can compute complex analogies that mean something to humans.

You can also query a Word2vec model for other assocations. Not everything has to be two analogies that mirror each other.

Google’s Word2vec Patent

Word2vec is a method of computing vector representations of words introduced by a team of researchers at Google led by Tomas Mikolov. Google hosts an open-source version of Word2vec released under an Apache 2.0 license. In 2014, Mikolov left Google for Facebook, and in May 2015, Google was granted a patent for the method, which does not abrogate the Apache license under which it has been released.

https://wiki.pathmind.com/word2vec#crazy

MercurysBall2 ago

That paper is so flawed. They are just computing how many times particular 'hate speech' words are said in these forums. Not looking at the context or the user accounts .. They completely ignore the strong research community and describe voat as a news aggregator only. They don't look at the percentage of accounts that actually indulge in the practise, or look at what are the most used words or terms. It's just a hit piece and hardly a 'scientific' paper.

ORDOTEMPLIINTERNETIS ago

Generalizations. Over-simplification. Demarcating single interpretations for words which may have multiple meanings. Associating stereotypes. Misguided certainty. Dismissive of different opinions. Associating separate beliefs.

This is JUST how MAINSTREAM MEDIA manipulates people into not thinking for themselves.

A real researcher would understand that VOAT is just a microcosm of the rest of the world, and besides MOST being concerned with FREEDOM OF SPEECH and SEEKING THE TRUTH, we have all kinds. If we were to discriminate based off of the opinions and words that we disagree with or make us uncomfortable, we would ignore the fact that those ideas exist and never confront them in this relatively safe space. Censorship doesn't eliminate anything. It ignores an individuals concern until that individual feels so "unheard" that they must use a different "forum" to express it. This is the danger they are perpetuating with this thought control PC madness, IGNORANCE, and EXTREMES.

THANKS "SCIENTISTS". How about you put some effort into investigate this phenomena like a real human - like most of our users have - so you can see its not so BINARY?