“Watkins, 34, who is running for Congress in Arizona, defended the movement but denied that he was Q”
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The purpose of this Daily Mail story is a hit piece on a Republican candidate.
Text analysis only works to a high degree of certainty if one uses a substantial documented reference from the author, such as published books, and the text in question is substantial enough to reference unique phrases particular to the author. A few paragraphs, especially if cryptically written, will provide nothing that would associate a phrase to a given author with any certainty.
https://ballotpedia.org/Ron_Watkins
I can buy this. I read some Q posts... and there wasn’t a whole lot there to analyze linguistically.
Correct. An excellent example of correct use was when it was used to document Bill Ayers as OBOZO’S ghost writer.
Yeah, that’s my take on it also.
Seems the Daily Mail and the NYT were awful sure of themselves over a spurious analysis.
Bingo. The article is pseudoscience:
1) Quote from the article: “The researchers who worked on the identification told The Times they hope unmasking Q will loosen QAnon’s hold on people.”
So the “researchers” had (and have) an agenda. They were seeking to prove what they needed to prove to further that agenda.
So the “research” can only be considered agitprop, based on that alone.
2) As a linguist, I call BS on the claim that people can’t change their style to match that of someone else. Actors do it all the time. So do comedians. And as Flick Lives said, the smaller the source text in question, the easier it is to emulate the style perfectly. It’s even easier when the style used in the source text was deliberately made using a synthetic style, and not the author’s normal writing style. And that was very obviously the case with Q’s posts.
3) The closeness of the (alleged) stylistic match was not specified quantitatively. They only offered a qualitative assessment of “closest” match, not a quantitative measure with error bars and confidence levels. Actual scientists consider *qualitative* assessments to be “hand waving,” not science.
To say nothing of failing to use a comprehensive set of test authors. Nor was it a blinded, randomized, controlled trial. They didn’t even have a control group.
Nor was it published in a peer-reviewed journal of linguistics. It was published, instead, in newspapers—otherwise known as propaganda rags.
Does anyone think that guy should be elected?