I keep hearing in the media how Corey Hurren, the individual arrested and charged with a number of offences in the #RideauHall incident this summer, was a QAnon follower. This annoys me deeply. Join me as I yell at the internet about causal logic, analytic leaps, and evidence.

I hear various iterations of this: him being a "supporter" to "motivated by". The evidence for this is three social media posts - they clearly express an interest in the movement; his insta also has a lot of pandemic memes. In total, 3/329 posts (or 1%) have Qanon content.

He also references Event 201 in the note found inside his car, but we don't know what he says about this. So that's a bit of a dead end. From this evidence, we can see the following logic developing:

Could someone determine your ideological leanings from 1% of your social media posts? Maybe. Could they say for certain what motivates you to do something on any given day? This seems even less likely to me.

For me, the first step (from sharing Qanon content to saying he has an interest) is fairly straightforward. But this is where things fall apart. We don't know the extent of this interest, and I haven't seen any interviews with friends or family that talk about this.

Moving from sharing Qanon content to the next two steps of being a follower or it motivating the incident is a huge logical leap, and I haven't seen any evidence that supports this.

Do I think that Hurren was a Qanon follower? Maybe. Do I think that it might have motivated the Rideau Hall incident? Maybe. Do we have any causal evidence of this? No.

I also think that Qanon is a problem in Canada - Intrepid did a great podcast on this with @AmarAmarasingam and @_MAArgentino https://www.intrepidpodcast.com/podcast/2020/8/18/ep-131-a-qampa-on-qanon

And I absolutely believe that Qanon could rise to the level of terrorist violence in this country. But I also think that facts matter, and that it's irresponsible to draw causal connections based on very little evidence.