How QAnon grew from one anonymous 4chan post

On October 28, 2017, an anonymous 4chan user claimed inside knowledge that Hillary Clinton's arrest was close. The arrest never came. Within four years, the movement built on those posts had been named in an FBI bulletin and targeted in the removal of tens of thousands of social media accounts.

October 31, 2026 · 4 min read · TruthRanking

The first source

On October 28, 2017, an anonymous user posted on the /pol/ board of 4chan, an anonymous message board, in a thread titled "Calm Before the Storm." The poster later signed as "Q Clearance Patriot," a reference to a U.S. Department of Energy security clearance for top-secret information. The first post said Hillary Clinton's extradition was "already in motion" and that her passport would be flagged effective October 30, NBC News reported. A post predicting her arrest between 7:45 and 8:30 a.m. on Monday, October 30, followed. NBC describes that as Q's second post. Bellingcat, an investigative research group, reports that the arrest prediction came from another anonymous poster whom Q was replying to.

The setting matters. On /pol/, "LARPing" meant posing as a well-placed insider leaking secrets to anonymous users, Bellingcat explains. Earlier examples went by names like FBIAnon, which appeared in July 2016, and CIAAnon. Bellingcat lists Q among a series of such posters. Bellingcat also calls Pizzagate, a 2016 theory about a child sex ring tied to a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, QAnon's most direct predecessor. In December 2016, a believer in that theory entered the pizzeria looking for a basement that did not exist, NBC reported. What the first Q poster intended is not documented.

How it spread

The early posts drew little notice at first. On November 11, 2017, they were rediscovered on 4chan, and Q's audience grew from there, according to Bellingcat. That month, two 4chan moderators worked with a YouTube host to promote the posts on other platforms, including a new subreddit that ran until March 2018.

In early 2018, Q's posts moved to 8chan, a board run by Ron Watkins and owned by his father, Jim Watkins, The New York Times reported. Q later said future posts would appear only there. 8chan went offline in August 2019 and later returned as 8kun.

By August 2018, Q had posted almost 1,800 messages, NBC News counted. A QAnon subreddit had 50,000 subscribers, and an app that collected the posts ranked No. 10 among paid apps in Apple's store for a day.

On May 30, 2019, the FBI's Phoenix field office issued a bulletin warning that conspiracy theories, naming QAnon and Pizzagate, could motivate domestic extremists, Homeland Security Today reported. In July 2020, Twitter removed more than 7,000 QAnon accounts. On October 6, 2020, Facebook said it would remove pages, groups and Instagram accounts "representing QAnon," even if they did not promote violence, the Associated Press reported. Reddit had begun banning QAnon groups in 2018, the AP noted.

Q stopped posting in December 2020, the ADL reported. On January 12, 2021, after the riot at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter said it had suspended more than 70,000 QAnon-linked accounts. Twitter said some individuals operated numerous accounts, which raised the total.

What it became

The Associated Press describes QAnon as a baseless belief in a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles. Its believers expected "the Storm," a reckoning that would sweep away elites with mass arrests.

That day kept moving. Newsweek compiled dated predictions that did not happen: Clinton's arrest in October 2017, a wave of suicides by public figures in February 2018, mass arrests set for December 5, 2018, January 19, 2019, and March 19, 2019, and a "storm" during the January 20, 2021, inauguration. When Clinton was not extradited, some followers said she had been secretly fitted with an ankle monitor, NBC reported. Bellingcat points to a Q slogan, "disinformation is necessary," that let believers explain away misses.

Agreement with the theory's claims proved durable. The research group PRRI began tracking three QAnon statements in March 2021. In March 2022, PRRI found 18% of Americans agreed that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and 27% agreed a storm is coming to sweep away elites. On June 24, 2022, after more than 18 months of silence, Q posted again on 8kun, the ADL reported.

What the record shows

Who wrote as Q has never been officially established. In February 2022, The New York Times reported on two independent teams of computational linguists, one at the Swiss firm OrphAnalytics and one in France. Each analyzed more than 100,000 words of Q's posts. Both concluded that Paul Furber, one of the early promoters, played the lead role in writing the early posts, and that Ron Watkins likely took over in early 2018. Neither team ruled out other contributors. Both men deny writing as Q. Stylometry gives a probability. It is evidence, and it is not a court finding.

Even the first posts are attributed differently. Accounts disagree on whether the specific arrest-time prediction came from Q or from a poster Q answered. The LARP reading explains where the format came from. It does not tell us what any later author believed.

The numbers need care too. Poll figures count people who agree with statements. They do not count people who call themselves QAnon followers, or people who ever read a Q post. Account suspension totals count accounts, and one person can run many.

How to trace a claim like this

1. Find the first post and read the room it was posted in. Q's opening posts sat inside a known genre of insider role-play on /pol/. Our guide on finding where a claim started explains how to locate it.
2. Log every dated prediction and check it on the date. A forecast that passes without the event is a failed prediction. A later reinterpretation is a new claim that needs its own evidence.
3. Separate republication from corroboration. Subreddits, video decoders and apps repeated one anonymous source. Volume added reach, and it added no evidence. See republication vs. corroboration.
4. Check what a number counts. Agreement with a poll statement, self-identified followers and suspended accounts are different measures.
5. Follow the source over time. Q changed platforms, may have changed authors, went silent and returned. Each change bears on who a claim should be attributed to.