A popular website for posts about the conspiracy group QAnon abruptly shut down after a fact-checking group identified the developer as a New Jersey man. Qmap.pub is among the largest websites promoting the QAnon conspiracy, with over 10 million visitors in July, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb Ltd., and served as the primary archive of QAnon’s posts. The website aggregates posts by Q, the anonymous figure behind the QAnon theory, and the creator of the Qmap.pub website is known online only as “QAppAnon.” The fact-checking site Logically.ai identified Jason Gelinas of New Jersey on Sept. 10 as the “developer and mouthpiece” for the site. New Jersey state records connect QAppAnon to Gelinas’s home address, Bloomberg found. Reached outside his home, Gelinas declined to comment on the Logically report, saying only that someone had sent it to him on Twitter after it was published. “I’m not going to comment on any of that,” Gelinas said when asked if he was behind the website Qmap. “I’m not going to get involved. I want to stay out of it.”
Wearing an American flag baseball cap, Gelinas said that QAnon is a “patriotic movement to save the country.” Hours after the initial contact from Bloomberg News, the website was no longer accessible. A LinkedIn profile for Gelinas says he works as an information security analyst at Citigroup. Citigroup declined to comment.
via bloombeg: QAnon Website Shuts Down After N.J. Man Identified as Operator
siehe auch: QAnon Key Figure Revealed as Financial Information Security Analyst from New Jersey. A Logically investigation identifies a key QAnon figure as New Jersey resident Jason Gelinas. The investigation ties QAnon properties to a company owned by Gelinas, an information technology specialist who has held prominent positions at both Credit Suisse and Citigroup. Ever since the shadowy figure known as Q made his first appearance on the 4chan imageboard in October of 2017, the author’s identity has remained a mystery. Since then, Q has posted thousands of ‘drops,’ converting legions of followers to the belief that Donald Trump is leading a global fight against a satanic cabal of child trafficking elites, commonly referred to in the QAnon world as the ‘Deep State’. Over the years, Q’s posts would move from the 4chan forum to 8chan, and finally to its later iteration, 8kun. But these forums weren’t where most of Q’s followers would go to access the drops: most would find them neatly compiled on a site called QMap, now the main platform on which Q’s drops are published. For years it was believed that QMap was an endeavour that was independent of both the chan forums and the person or people posting Q’s drops, but recent discoveries concerning an IP address behind QMap raised questions as to whether Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan and 8kun, an elusive figure in his own right, could also be Q. As some QAnon researchers have pointed out, however, the story of Q’s operations does not end with Jim Watkins.
What is QMap? In the world of QAnon, the site qmap.pub is something of a sacred text. It’s a site designed to collect Q’s posts on other message boards and collate them in a searchable database; over the years, it has grown to include glossaries on themes, profiles on people named across the drops (handily sorted into ‘Evil’, ‘Traitor/Pawn’, and ‘Patriot’), and even a prayer wall. Most followers of QAnon tend not to visit Q’s posts on 8kun and the ‘chan’ boards where they are initially posted (the vernacular used on those sites is deliberately exclusionary and newcomers are often put off). This makes qmap.pub a crucial port of call for all QAnon information and a major node in how the movement disseminates its lore. The site has been hitting over 10 million monthly users since April of this year. The developer of QMap has been known only as ‘QAPPANON’ since the launch of the site in May of 2018. They have a successful Patreon where they regularly post and update their following on the running of the website. They pull in over 600 patrons and a $3,320 a month income – although there is a $4,000 a month target for ‘running costs’ of the website. In addition to the website, QMap also had an accompanying app on the Google Play Store (for $2.99) until it was removed in May this year as “harmful content”. The user QAPPANON is synonymous with qmap.pub, acting as its sole developer and mouthpiece.
