From November 2017 and forwards the mystical anonymous poster ”Q” filled their followers with messages regarding American politics acting like the person behind the Q was someone who had insight into both the intelligence community and the important political surroundings. Q posted on different image boards but as the amount of followers grew different web pages were created where canonical Q-posts (usually called ”drops” or Q-drops”) was preserved, numbered, tagged and interlinked. The QAnons – the movement formed around the messages from Q – were fierce discussants on the Internet occupying almost every possible social media platform. The movement reached it’s peak when the QAnons spearheaded the attack against the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021. During the autumn of 2020 almost all big social media platforms had started to purge QAnons, kickbanning them and thus removing their accounts and created content.

In January 2021 I started to preserve all Q-posts downloading them in raw text format and saving them as individual files and also saving them in picture format. It is a very interesting material, full of dog whistling, echo-chamber-like links to supporters social media and memes whose messages are very internal. Downloading the posts as text has given me a possibility to use different text processing tools to investigate the corpus. It has also given me an insight into what happens with preserved internet content when links suddenly are broken and the movement surrounding the content is banned. How do we preserve the content of a deplatformed movement? What are the limits of digital preservation of interlinked content created by a community?