I am pleased to announce the first forensic evidence of Q’s whereabouts, discovered by my colleague Abigail X ( @BobPythonic) with help from Robert Amour ( @kunstderfuge1). The full story is up @Bellingcat; we summarize our work in this thread. https://www.bellingcat.com/uncategorized/2021/05/10/where-in-the-world-is-q-clues-from-image-metadata/

Using image metadata, we have been able to geolocate Q to a specific part of the world. Highlighted below are the only two time zones where, in our sample, two or more of Q’s images were taken.

The *vast* majority, ~68%, were from the Pacific time zone.

So… how did we do it?

Most images in Q drops don’t have enough useful metadata to analyze, but a specific subset, images which are phone screenshots, do. In the “DateCreated” field, we found a series of timestamps that reveal the time when Q took these screenshots, just before posting the drop.

There’s no time zone info in “DateCreated”, but by subtracting it from the drop’s UTC timestamp, we can infer the time zone in which Q took the screenshots.

This “time diff” represents the time btwn Q taking the screenshot & posting the drop, PLUS the UTC offset of Q’s time zone

Plotting these time diffs, we find a two distinct clusters: one just before a +8 hour diff, and two near −7 and −8.

UTC+8 is a time zone including several countries in Asia, notably China and the Philippines. The other clusters correspond to the Pacific time zone.

The Pacific time zone is a bit more complex, changing between UTC−7 (PDT) and UTC−8 (PST) once a year. As it happens, Q’s timestamps also follow this pattern on the same dates.

This is clear evidence that these screenshots were taken on Pacific time, a few mins before posting.

Our sample, though it consists of only 29 images, covers almost Q’s entire operational history. It runs from November 7, 2011 (on 4chan, before Q’s first tripcode) to September 23, 2020.

In our sample, Q only posted from UTC +8 on three dates: Feb. 8 + 10, 2018 & Feb 14, 2019.

By contrast, Q posted from the Pacific time zone on 16 separate dates. Thus, we conclude that Q’s main base of operation was the West Coast (or possibly Nevada, which is also in the Pacific time zone).

But we don’t stop there. The marvelous people at @Bellingcat (Maxim Edwards and @gianfiorella chief among them) did some VERY adroit geolocation work from the photos Q posted, and now we can tell you about Q’s taste in hotels.

But we won’t, because we need to give you SOME reason to go read the article. :D

However, the hotel info is going to be VERY useful for journalists looking to rule suspects in or out as Q.

If someone claims to be Q and can prove they stayed at the right places…

Well, you’re looking at a pretty good candidate, ESPECIALLY if they have passport stamps indicating their presence in a UTC+8 country on all three dates that Q took a screenshot while within that timezone.

Because UTC+8 includes the Philippines, some of you may be tempted to see this as proof of Jim Watkins’ involvement, at least at some points in the QAnon story.

It’s absolutely not proof. If it WERE proof, I’d promote it in those terms. But it’s not, so here we are.

In fact:

The evidence in this piece is most consistent with the hypothesis that Q is an individual on the West Coast who has traveled abroad (especially to China).

Coordination between two or more people to post as Q is *possible*, but one would have to be on Pacific time.

For anyone who wants to reproduce and/or build on our findings, Abigail created a Github repository.

Please make use of it! We may have overlooked avenues of investigation, and *you* could make the next discovery. Good luck! https://github.com/abigailxyzw/image-metadata