The communications from the source "Q" are regarded by the QAnon movement, a political and conspiracy theory group that rose to prominence in the early months of 2021 after storming the Capitol in Washington, D.C., as their primary information source. Between November 2017 and November 2022, "Q" posted brief remarks on many message boards, including 4Chan, 8Chan, and others. The messages make predictions about future political developments and offer commentary on current political happenings (OperationQ 2025). 

The Q-drop corpus—the 4,966 posts made by the poster Q—is full of rhetorical questions with the purpose of inciting the reader to "Do your own research." Relating to earlier research, I have made a collection of all Q-drops in .txt format, which makes it possible to search through all posts using the program Grep (Grep 2025). In this poster I will map and analyse the use of rhetorical questions in the corpus; Especially such rhetorical questions that invite the reader to do their own research using a search engine. 

Purpose

“Do your own research” or DYOR has been trending in social media for a couple of years. It is often used in connection to the spread of conspiracy theories and by authors on the subject described as: “The basic idea behind DYOR is that laypeople should not follow the conclusions of experts but instead seek out information on their own to arrive at their own conclusions.” (Ballatyne et al 2022). Using a known corpus of conspiracy theory as the Q-drops to investigate the use of DYOR-inciting will put new light on the reciprocative nature of conspiracy theory. 

Method

The investigation is performed in two phases. First a mapping phase, in which the material is reviewed through a hermeneutic method and categories of injunction towards “do your own research” are created. Then an analytical phase in which a search for these different categories in the material is performed. This will form the basis of an analysis of how the Q-drops urges the followers to “Do their own research.” The research process and the results are presented in the form of a poster. 

Results

There will be two types of results. First, a variety of categories that describe the settings in which DYOR is employed are the outcomes of the mapping process. The second is the frequency of occurrence of each category in the corpus.

References

Ballantyne, N., Celniker, J., &Dunning, D. (2022). “Do Your Own Research”. Social Epistemology, 38(3), 302-317.

Grep (2025), Grep Manual Page, Retrieved January 27, 2025 from https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/grep.1.html 

OperationQ (2025). Intelligence drops. Retrieved January 27, 2025 from https://operationq.pub/