In this era of misinformation and unreliable news, it can often be difficult to drill down to the origins of a story, especially one that's been in the headlines for some time. That's the issue that Twitter user Tim Hogan ran into when tracing back the infamous conspiracy theory Qanon to its source, eventually coming across what appeared to be the first mention of the name on Twitter back in the wilds of October 2016. It was an important find, drawing parallels to all sorts of other juicy things hitting the news at the time and seemingly cementing connections to all sorts of lurid back-room dealings.
There was just one problem, as fellow Twitterite Tim Dewey pointed out: the supposed lynchpin of Hogan's theory, the account that first tweeted the word 'Qanon' over a year before the first documented "Q drop," was a bot designed to generate random, entirely fictional titles for the long-running PS2 game series Simple 2000. The bot in question, @simplebot2000, used to tweet out a fake game name at 20 minutes past the hour, every hour, always in the same style ("Vol. X: The Y"), until it shut down at the beginning of 2020, and its entry for October 7th 2016 was no different: "Vol. 7937: The Qanon."
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To Dewey's credit, he does, however disingenuously, grant Hogan the possibility that @simplebot2000 is secretly a deep-state plant, "a time-traveling Twitter bot," or possibly even Q themself, but just to make sure, he reached out to the bot's creator, "Taizou," for comment. He, in turn, was happy to shed some light on the history and development of the unfairly-maligned bot.
The fact of the matter is, of course, that it's all one great big coincidence, a joke at the expense of an enduring series of budget video games that would provide basic and generic experiences of various games which would have names like "The Tennis," "The Mahjong," and so on. As Taizou explained, @simplebot2000 was simply programmed to "pick a random noun from Wiktionary, prepend 'The' to it with a random volume number and tweet it." As such, the bot's use of the word "qanon" actually corresponds to a word present in Wiktionary since 2006 (an alternate spelling of "qanun," a Near-Eastern string instrument, for the curious) and in fact has nothing at all to do with the dangerous and pervasive conspiracy theory.
It's bad news for Hogan, unfortunately, who manages to tie the Tweet not just to Qanon but to the notorious Access Hollywood tape, the GRU (the Russian military intelligence division) and the Chinese Communist Party. While it's certainly a hell of a coincidence, it's doubtful that a bot dedicated to generating new names for budget PS2 games would stand up as evidence in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Hopefully Hogan has learned a valuable lesson from this whole experience about vetting his sources.
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