En af de største QAnon Sites gik mørkt efter citigroup fyret operatøren
QMap.pub was one of the biggest QAnon archives on the internet — on the order of 10 million visitors a month — until it went dark in September 2020. The fact-checking shop Logically.ai named the operator: Jason Gelinas, a New Jersey IT director at Citigroup and the sole employee of Patriot Platforms, the entity credited on the site and on an Android app Google had already yanked from Play as “harmful content.” Citi put him on paid leave, then fired him on October 6, 2020 for running an outside business without approval. Reuters confirmed the termination. Reached outside his house in an American-flag cap, Gelinas called QAnon “a patriotic movement to save the country” and declined to discuss the site.
QMap was not a forum so much as a lookup table for “Q drops,” the anonymous 8chan/8kun posts the movement treated as scripture. When the operator was outed, the domain degraded into a page of links and vanished. QAnon itself did not. YouTube joined Twitter and Facebook in October 2020 and pulled tens of thousands of videos. The FBI had already flagged the movement as a domestic-terrorism threat. January 6, 2021 made the point in the Capitol, with the spear-carrying “QAnon Shaman” among the crowd. After the failed predictions, the anonymous “Q” went silent — a “Q drought” — and the mythology migrated to Telegram, Gab, and a rotating cast of mirrors. Researchers have since mapped Q-linked communities in dozens of countries.
It bears repeating that none of this is Anonymous. If half of what QAnon says is true and half is false, the product is a psyop that sends believers chasing what is not there. Anonymous is not a political party and does not endorse politicians in its name. Gelinas was a salaried bank technologist running a conspiracy library on the side. That is the story: not that a website died, but that a Fortune 500 IT manager was the librarian.
Relateret fra organisationen alliance: Bill Cooper, Forsøg på at rydde misforståelser om anonym, Anonym partikapring, og en Oklahoma Q følger senere anklaget for mordet på hans kærestes barn.
