Ron Watkins

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

‘If he was the original author, and it is right about [the trip code] being taken away from him, which we believe he is, then why is it worth it for him to still be committed to the bit at this point? But who knows?’ At this point in our meandering conversation, I was getting anxious that the party might start before we got to the main point – so I very subtly tried to get Woolf to it: Me: ‘So … who’s Q?’ Woolf: ‘It’s Ron Watkins.’ If guilt requires means, motive and opportunity, Watkins Junior meets two of the three criteria almost by default. Ron Watkins had been working as the administrator of 8chan and his father’s other sites since Brennan parted ways with their company. This gave him the access to the trip codes of any user of 8chan, suggesting that if they had managed to lure the original Q to 8chan, and have him discredit 4chan in the process, the account could be there for either taking or handing over.

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‘After we doorstepped his dad Jim posts this weird video – we’re on our way driving back – saying after all these tumultuous times, I’m resigning as 8chan administrator. “Today I bring the ship to dock.” ’ When it comes to why Ron Watkins might have wanted to spend several years of his life as Q, though, Woolf draws a blank, saying that he ‘grew up sort of like a vaguely normal kid with his mom in Seattle, Washington. We talked to his best friend growing up, he used to sing barbershop … he’s just some dude.’ If Ron Watkins was indeed Q, and most people who have looked into the mystery believes he was, then there is little to go on as to why. Perhaps it was a ruse to keep people on 8chan and keep the site in the public eye.

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QAnon’s move to 8chan raised some eyebrows, given it had previously only really been known for hosting content after it had been banned by 4chan – which Q had not been. Frederick Brennan was no longer the owner and operator of 8chan, since he had sold the site in 2014 to a father-and-son team, Jim and Ron Watkins.29 Jim was a former US army helicopter pilot who at the time operated a strange and sprawling set of businesses out of the Philippines. His son Ron helped him in the operation of his online empire. Jim Watkins’ business experience perhaps made him well suited to be the owner of a site like 8chan.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve
Published 9 Jul 2024

But that Q, the supposed fake, insisted he was real, and appealed to Ron Watkins: “please log in and confirm.” Ron did, and he sided with the new Q. Fred thought this was the moment the Watkinses gained total control of the Q canon. He presented his evidence on the podcast Reply All, which took his theory mainstream. About a year and a half later, the New York Times published a linguistic analysis of Q’s postings. Two teams of forensic linguists, one Swiss and one French, found that Furber was likely the first Q, and Ron Watkins was the second. Their analyses suggested Ron took over in early 2018. (Both Furber and Ron Watkins deny they were Q.) If Q’s followers noticed Fred’s work, it did not matter to most of them.

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The timing, Mann’s outreach, the way Fred designed the site—“You combine all these different factors, and that’s what helped me grow the brand,” Mann said. “That basically led to 8chan becoming this million-user site.” 8chan got so popular so quickly that Fred was having trouble keeping the site online. A month into the Gamergate frenzy, he got an email from Ron Watkins offering to host it. Ron Watkins lived in the Philippines with his father, Jim. They had a family internet business that included the Japanese site 2channel, the original inspiration for 4chan. They also had a pig farm. Jim wanted to buy 8chan, and he wanted Fred to move to the Philippines and serve as admin. Life could be easier there, Jim said, because Fred could afford to pay for a home health aide.

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As I was starting to pay attention to 8chan, Fred Brennan was starting to wonder if he’d made a big mistake in creating it. In April 2016, he resigned as 8chan’s admin. He couldn’t take it anymore. He posted a public letter to users apologizing for his programming failures, but he was still too scared to say he didn’t want to be associated with nazis and creeps. He knew they could decide to ruin his life. Ron Watkins took over as admin. Fred thought the Watkinses found a glamour in being hated. He didn’t know what they actually believed in, if they believed in anything. He saw in Jim the same pull he’d felt: the desire to be liked by the users. Ron put a tagline on 8chan’s home page: “Embrace Infamy.” * * * When I was supposed to be looking for stories about people in the real world, I’d scroll through 4chan and 8chan to see what the users were talking about, how they were interpreting the Trump campaign.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Reframing chaos as order, telling believers they alone hold the truth, restores their sense of autonomy and control. It’s why QAnon adherents often repeat to one another their soothing mantra: “Trust the plan.” Extremism researchers would long speculate that many or all of Q’s posts—four thousand in all, unspooled over three years—were actually the work of Ron Watkins, a thirty-year-old programmer who had recently taken over running 8chan, the 4chan spinoff forum. Watkins even seemed to hint as much in a 2021 documentary, telling his interviewer, “It was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies how to do intelligence work,” though he added, “But never as Q.”

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The language pointedly signaled that Democrats had embraced the view long advanced by researchers, social scientists, and dissident Valleyites: that the dangers from social media are not a matter of simply moderating better or tweaking policies. They are rooted in the fundamental nature of the platforms. And they are severe enough to threaten American democracy itself. There was another change that January: QAnon all but collapsed. “We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able,” Ron Watkins, the administrator of 8chan (now rebranded as “8kun”) widely suspected to have written Q’s material, posted the morning of Biden’s inauguration. On Telegram—a social app that had grown popular with QAnon as Twitter had applied greater friction—he urged followers to respect Biden’s legitimacy. He added, “As we enter into the next administration please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”

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Eshoo to Mark Zuckerberg, January 21, 2021. malinowski.house.gov/sites/malinowski.house.gov/files/Letter%20to%20Facebook%20—%20Malinowski_Eshoo_final_0.pdf 112 “The fundamental problem”: Tom Malinowski and Anna G. Eshoo to Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki, January 21, 2021. malinowski.house.gov/sites/malinowski.house.gov/files/Letter%20to%20YouTube%20—%20Malinowski_Eshoo_final_0.pdf 113 “We gave it our all”: Post by Ron Watkins (@codemonkeyz), Telegram, January 20, 2021. 114 “As we enter into the”: Ibid. 115 An 8kun moderator purged: Post by Pillow, 8kun, January 20, 2021. archive.is/lG6er 116 “Mods please explain”: Post by StartAgain, Greatawakening.win, January 20, 2021. 117 “being a kid and seeing”: Post by FL350, Greatawakening.win, January 20, 2021. 118 “EVERYTHING will be happening”: Post by Bubba1776, Greatawakening.win, January 20, 2021. 119 “I have lost friends”: Ibid.