Some say it was a guy in Australia that created the original Q account (Paul Furber, https://t.co/d94IPkxc92) cosplaying with others who made the same sort of accounts (like a bunch of nerds) on 4chan; and that he moved to an image board on 8chan, becoming even more popular.
1/22
How many of us saw the double entendre in the QAnon slogan, “The Storm.”
We all probably assumed it had to do with proverbial precipitation. No, it literally meant the act of storming.
QAnon presents a threat to us, because it is severely misinforming our loved ones.
Some say it was a guy in Australia that created the original Q account (Paul Furber, https://t.co/d94IPkxc92) cosplaying with others who made the same sort of accounts (like a bunch of nerds) on 4chan; and that he moved to an image board on 8chan, becoming even more popular.
But he got his password hacked twice. The first time it happened, they guessed his password (some derivative of “Matlock”). Because random people could post as Q, he changed it by adding an exclamation point.
The second time, though, the owners of 8chan stole Furber’s Q account for themselves. They’d also “stolen” 2chan from a Japanese guy named, Hiroyuki Nishimura: https://t.co/I8AtBEPJee
(Due to talk of the person behind the Q account leaving 8chan and starting his own chan)
With that account would go all of Q’s followers, so they seized the account.
Their message board, their coding, their rules.
Furber couldn’t complain about it either, or it would reveal him as a fraud. He’d already gone on Infowars and talked about it like it was all real
How could he complain that someone took over the account of his imaginary friend and then turned his imaginary friend against him?
The owners of 8chan, the new owners of the Q account, are alleged to be the Watkins duo who moved to the Philippines to allegedly...
-try to gain global power through image board creation and acquisition (this according to a coder they hired to create the code for 8chan).
The whistleblower/coder is a handicapped guy who has brittle bone disease named, Frederick Brennan. They’d invited him to live...
-in the Philippines to develop their 8chan code from the start.
Brennan tattled after the Q account started inspiring dangerous people, so they allegedly set him up to be arrested on a charge of cyber libel. Due to his condition, he would have died...
-if he’d been in jail for even 3 days. He barely escaped the Philippines with his life, even as authorities were looking for him in the airport.
After his escape, he started campaigning against his own creation. That’s what led to a series of events and...
-investigations that caused 8chan’s hosting service to go down.
Brennan also contacted any other potential hosting services and tried to block them that way. It worked for 3 months. No 8chan boards, no Q posts.
Eventually, the father/son duo got a version of the board back up and called something like 8kun. The only people left from the old 8chan were the Q people, but the board didn’t work very well and third party accounts weren’t able to get messages to post.
Ron and Jim Watkins would need to change all the passwords in order to reset the software and fix it (by “rotating the SALT on the trip-codes”). But how do you do that without resetting the Q’s account password and...
-effectively making it impossible for the Q identity to be verified for drops to the message board? For any tech savvy Q followers paying attention, that would be an issue for the integrity of the fraudulent narrative they’d built.
Their half-baked solution:
1. Tweeting about the need to change the password; then,
2. Having the Q account post on the board saying that Q had seen the tweet and how it would lock him out if they did that; then,
3. Finally offering the solution that Q should...
-start his own chan.
This is ironic, since the rationale for taking over Furber’s Q account in the first place was allegedly to avoid having Q leave 8chan. But, since they now controlled the account (and, by extension, the followers), that no longer mattered.
The only thing is, if you remember, no third parties could get messages to go through to their “new” board at that time; hence the need for the SALT rotation on the trip-codes. That means, the Q message would have had to have come through the admin account, since those...
-were delivered to the board differently than third party messages. Frederick Brennan (the whistleblower/coder) explains the whole timeline in fascinating detail here: https://t.co/0HfLxc1Xt2
There, you hear the following:
1. Q started off as a fantasy cosplay account on 4chan in Australia by Paul Furber, before growing in popularity and being moved to 8chan.
2. It was secretly taken over by Jim and Ron Watkins in the Philippines, after Furber moved it.
3. Watkins still manipulates the account’s fan base today (even taking donations “on behalf of Q”); fomenting conspiracy theories that have resulted in acts of domestic terrorism in the United States of America; comms with other prominent Q figures
https://t.co/49Ac6mOILh
More from Politics
For a few weeks I’ve been wondering about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and just how she emerged as a politico. Her path to Washington is shocking, at the very least. My first question was: What were her campaign positions BEFORE she became a national figure?
1/
So I went to her campaign website and took that web address and looked through the internet archive. When I went back to 2017, it was not her website, it belonged to the group "Brand New Congress."
2/
Here's what the web address https://t.co/Uhz2q4Dpll looks like now:
3/
Here's what the same web address looked like in late 2017:
4/
What's “Brand New Congress?” BNC is a group of Bernie Sanders staffers who got together, decided to make the 2018 midterms all about Bernie policies by taking his ideas & finding 400 Bernie carbon copies to dump into Congressional & other races, creating a 400 headed Bernie.
5/
1/
So I went to her campaign website and took that web address and looked through the internet archive. When I went back to 2017, it was not her website, it belonged to the group "Brand New Congress."
2/
Here's what the web address https://t.co/Uhz2q4Dpll looks like now:
3/
Here's what the same web address looked like in late 2017:
4/
What's “Brand New Congress?” BNC is a group of Bernie Sanders staffers who got together, decided to make the 2018 midterms all about Bernie policies by taking his ideas & finding 400 Bernie carbon copies to dump into Congressional & other races, creating a 400 headed Bernie.
5/
"3 million people are estimated not to have official photo ID, with ethnic minorities more at risk". They will "have to contact their council to confirm their ID if they want to vote"
This is shameful legislation, that does nothing to tackle the problems with UK elections.THREAD
There is no evidence in-person voter fraud is a problem, and it wd be near-impossible to organise on an effective scale. Campaign finance violations, digital disinformation & manipulation of postal voting are bigger issues, but these are crimes of the powerful, not the powerless.
In a democracy, anything that makes it harder to vote - in particular, anything that disadvantages one group of voters - should face an extremely high bar. Compulsory voter ID takes a hammer to 3 million legitimate voters (disproportionately poor & BAME) to crack an imaginary nut
If the government is concerned about the purity of elections, it should reflect on its own conduct. In 2019 it circulated doctored news footage of an opponent, disguised its twitter feed as a fake fact-checking site, and ran adverts so dishonest that even Facebook took them down.
Britain's electoral law largely predates the internet. There is little serious regulation of online campaigning or the cash that pays for it. That allows unscrupulous campaigners to ignore much of the legal framework erected since the C19th to guard against electoral misconduct.
This is shameful legislation, that does nothing to tackle the problems with UK elections.THREAD
Millions of people do not have photo ID. By forcing through mandatory voter-ID the government risk disenfranchising millions of legitimate voters. https://t.co/y0Upzof2FI
— Electoral Reform Society (@electoralreform) February 17, 2021
There is no evidence in-person voter fraud is a problem, and it wd be near-impossible to organise on an effective scale. Campaign finance violations, digital disinformation & manipulation of postal voting are bigger issues, but these are crimes of the powerful, not the powerless.
In a democracy, anything that makes it harder to vote - in particular, anything that disadvantages one group of voters - should face an extremely high bar. Compulsory voter ID takes a hammer to 3 million legitimate voters (disproportionately poor & BAME) to crack an imaginary nut
If the government is concerned about the purity of elections, it should reflect on its own conduct. In 2019 it circulated doctored news footage of an opponent, disguised its twitter feed as a fake fact-checking site, and ran adverts so dishonest that even Facebook took them down.
Britain's electoral law largely predates the internet. There is little serious regulation of online campaigning or the cash that pays for it. That allows unscrupulous campaigners to ignore much of the legal framework erected since the C19th to guard against electoral misconduct.
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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."
We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.
Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)
It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.
Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".
As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said this. But I will now. Requiring such statements in applications for appointments and promotions is an affront to academic freedom, and diminishes the true value of diversity, equity of inclusion by trivializing it. https://t.co/NfcI5VLODi
— Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) November 10, 2018
We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.
Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)
It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.
Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".
