Others will be better to answer this in full from a technical angle. But, thumbnail is, a special sub was set up on 8chan that has multiple safe guards so that Q is usually the only one that can post there.  You can verify that a post on that board is truely him by what is called a tripcode.  The correct tripcode shows that the poster has gone through all the safe guards.  It is changed occasionally.  The current trip code looks like this Q !!mG7VJxZNCI and will be shown on all those sites that re publish his posts. the top line of a legit post will look something like this Q !!mG7VJxZNCI ID: cbe23c No.3128926. common post pages include: https://8ch.net/patriotsfight/index.html https://qntmpkts.keybase.pub/ https://qanon.pub/ Otthers may have other ones EDIT: Although there is some controversy about v/greatawakening vs v/theawakening, I am not sure I would agree with the characterization of v/theawakening being just a reddit knock-off. Although if you start a sub asking that  you will probably have a very spirited debate.  This however, is by far my favorite one.