NCTC EXPOSITORY WRITING
FIRST PLACE
How Social Media Allowed the Rise of QAnon Addison Smith
On January 6, 2021, my family and I buzzed around the house all day with our eyes glued to our screens. I remember on that day checking and refreshing news feeds and social media accounts to see if there was any more news about the mob on the Capitol. In the hours afterward, we began seeing photos and videos of the mob breaching the capitol and posing in senators’ seats. Many of the protestors at the Capitol had shirts or flags emblazoned with a large “Q,” the symbol for QAnon, a conspiracy theory that began circulating the internet in 2016. How did we get here? QAnon is a conspiracy born and raised in the depths of the internet, and it spread through message boards and social media. The core belief of QAnon is that elite Democrats and other people in high-power positions run a satanic pedophilic and cannibalistic cabal, and former president Donald Trump was secretly fighting to take down the sextrafficking ring. Conspiracy theories about child abuse are nothing new, according to journalist Adrienne LaFrance in an interview with NPR’s Dave Davies. LaFrance says “QAnon really borrows from earlier conspiracy theories and kind of eats lesser conspiracy theories as it goes” (Davies and LaFrance). Another fundamental belief of QAnon is that the media cannot be trusted. The combination of these beliefs led to rampant, unchecked misinformation on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which led to the violent insurrection on January 6. QAnon was allowed to spread and become truly dangerous because of lenient social media moderation and has shown how dangerous unchecked spread of misinformation on social media can be; the platforms that allowed those conversations to take place need to be held responsible for not intervening. To understand how an outlandish conspiracy theory resulted in a mob on the Capitol trying to disrupt the results of the 2020 presidential election, it is important to understand how QAnon became so popular and widespread. The insurrection on January 6 was not a sudden outlash from an angry political party, it was a culmination of years of online misinformation and distrust that had been simmering on the back burner of American politics. QAnon had been recruiting followers since late 2017 and manipulating them into seeing the “truth.” QAnon was unique in the fact that it encouraged believers to do their own research to find the truth behind hints left by Q, the leader of the conspiracy. These hints were posted on the message board website 8Kun and became known as “Q drops” to believers. Game designer Reed Berkowitz explains how QAnon is so alluring to believers because of how it is designed in “QAnon Resembles the Games I Design. But for Believers, there is No Winning.” According to Berkowitz, “The QAnon call to “do the research” breaks down resistance to new ideas. Guiding people to arrive at conclusions themselves is a perfect way to get them to accept a new and conflicting ideology as their own … [and] instills a distrust for society and the competence of others” (Berkowitz). In other words, because Q encourages people to come to their own conclusions instead of telling them what to believe, followers of Q are more certain of their beliefs and the “truths” that they found. Avi Selk and Abby Ohlheiser go further to explain how QAnon spread in their article “How QAnon, the Conspiracy Theory Spawned by a Trump 51 The April Perennial
