This is the log for my poster presentation "“Take These Broken Links” - Twitter, the Q-drops and the collapse of a digital ecosystem". Here I will post explanations of the research presented in the poster.

The QAnon-movement, a conspiracy theory and political movement who gained fame in the storming of the Capitol in Washington D.C in the beginning of 2021, see the messages from the source “Q” as their most important source of information. “Q” has posted short messages on different message boards (4Chan, 8Chan et cetera) since November 2017. The messages comment on contemporary political events and claim to foresee political development. Who the source, “Q” is, is not known, although speculations exist on the internet. At least we know that the person or persons making the posts seems to want us to believe that they have insight into the backstage of the political scene. In the beginning of 2021 I downloaded the 4953 messages from Q, usually called the Q-drops, as raw text and as pictures. This has given me the possibility to do different types of content analysis of the messages using tools as awk and grep of the Unix and Linux operating systems. Now I want to use this material to analyze the core utility of the internet - its core purpose according to the hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson; “the cells interlinked within cells interlinked” to use Vladimir Nabokov vibrant zukunftvision from the postmodern poetry of Pale fire.

This is the beginning of my abstract - read the pdf file here

If you are interested in examining the Q-drops in the form I have used them in this investigation (and some others) you can download them here. It is a ZIP-file containing 4953 txt-files and 4953 png-files. The txt-files are excellent to perform different command line operations on (grep, awk etcetera). The png-files makes it possible to see attached pictures, memes and so on.

Q-drops

I have done a few different analysis of the Q-drops using the material you can download above. In an earlier poster presented on the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), 2021, I investigated how often different conspiracy-theories were mentioned in the Q-drops. You can reach the poster here. To perform what I did in the current poster I extracted all Tweets from the Q-drops using grep (grep "twitter" *.txt > analys.txt). The file created from this command contained two columns - one with the name of the text-file in which the search word "twitter" was found (example "382.txt"), the next column contained the the row in which the keyword "twitter" were found. You can download it here below.

Grep using Keyword "Twitter

Next step was to dispose of non-links (mentions of "twitter" without linking to twitter) and manually follow each tweet to investigate its status. I used six different categories to define the status of the Tweet - an explanation will follow below. The next link contains the file after added analysis and mark-up.

Extracted Tweets with mark-up

THE CATEGORIES:

• Archived - Archived in the US National archives
• Deleted - Tweet deleted (by user or Twitter)
• Exists – Tweet still exists – link is valid
• Hidden - Tweet hidden by user (cannot be retrieved)
• Removed - Account doesn't exist (removed by user or Twitter)
• Resusp - Retweeting a suspended account (an existing user retweets a suspended account)
• Suspended - Account suspended (by Twitter, usually because of rule-breaking)

Quality of the twitter-links in the Q-drops

Next week it is time for the Poster Slam - the two minutes presentation when you tell people at the conference (mostly other poster-presenters) what your research is about. Here is my presentation:

presentation

The Programme and the book of abstracts have been released also and can be studied here.