Two teams of computer scientists running stylometric algorithms believe they’ve identified the author of the very first few QAnon posts as a 45-year-old South African software developer and tech journalist Paul Furber – before 8chan administrator Ron Watkins took over the persona, the New York Times reports. QAnon researchers had long suspected Furber of being the original author as he had shared the first “Q drop” posts on 8chan and acted as if he’d stumbled across them, but the analysis comparing the linguistic styles present in his publicly attributed tweets and articles with the Q posts and found some very strong similarities between the two. Furber spoke with the Times and tried to play it off by saying Q’s writing style had influenced him. The teams also determined a rough point at which Watkins took over authoring the Q posts from Furber as some time in early 2018 by comparing the posts to Watkins’s publicly attributed writings.