NCTC Creative Nonfiction.....................................................................................................pages

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

Quip, Got so Big and Scary.” In the article, Selk and Ohlheiser argue that “Q’s messages were so vague that fans could easily graft their preferred fantasy villains onto its cabal of Democrat-led globalists” (Selk and Ohlheiser). The problem with QAnon is that the conspiracy theory fed on real fears. Child abuse and sex trafficking are real problems that society deals with, and once it was established to believers that there was a secret pedophile ring, anyone could be transformed into a Satan-worshipping pedophile. QAnon is a unique conspiracy theory because instead of telling its followers what to believe, they are encouraged to learn the “truth” themselves and to find hidden clues and secrets like in a game. The core belief of QAnon, that there is a secret, satanic pedophile ring among high-ranking people, allowed followers to paint anyone distrusted as a villain. The empowerment given to followers by doing their own research, and the belief in a great evil in the form of a satanic pedophile ring posed were just two of the warning signs that social media platforms should have been aware of before the insurrection on January 6. While QAnon started on message boards, it would not have had as much of a far-reaching affect if it were not for social media sites and news channels. Once QAnon was established and gained followers, it had to spread to major social media platforms in order to have any real impact. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube gave QAnon the power it needed to become dangerous. Matt Gertz explains in the article “From Pizzagate to the Capitol Riot: How Rightwing Media Extremism Led to the January 6 Insurrection” that prior to the 2016 presidential election, “conservative leaders spent decades telling their supporters not to believe reporting from mainstream news sources and building an elaborate partisan media infrastructure and for them to use instead” (Gertz). Years before Trump became president the conservative media world had been trained to distrust any media that did not come from rightwing sources. This primed conservatives to not only reject evidence that conspiracy theories were circulating with rapid speed, but to also readily accept anything Trump says as truth. Trump was the savior in QAnon, but he also may have been the most important figure in spreading and legitimizing the conspiracy. According to Gertz, “[Trump] personally consumed hours of rightwing media content each day, turning its particular obsessions into federal policy,” he goes on to add “Trump retweeted QAnon adherents more than 300 times” (Gertz). To QAnon believers, Trump’s open support of the conspiracy not only legitimized their ideas but gave them power and a platform to spread more content, and ideas from Trump’s social media feed influenced his federal policy decisions. QAnon came into its power on social media platforms. Conservative Republicans had been primed to believe any ideas that came from rightwing sources long before Trump became president. The combination of conservatives rejecting non-conservative news and Trump’s open support for QAnon on Twitter made the perfect storm that allowed QAnon to flourish. When thinking of the damage that QAnon has done, violent images from January 6 come to mind. However, QAnon has shaken the trust in U.S. government in ways that may last for decades. QAnon’s core belief is that there is a secret ring of pedophiles and cannibals that many political figures and social elite are a part of, and the government has covered it up. While many people may not believe this idea word for word, the far reach of a conspiracy theory built on this idea breaks down confidence in government and elected figures in subtle ways. One of the major ways that QAnon has impacted the public’s confidence in the U.S. government is with uncertainty about the 2020 election. Marc-André Argentino mentioned in “QAnon and the Storm of the U.S. Capitol: The Offline Effect of Online Conspiracy Theories” how in October of 2019 he had warned “if there were delays or other complications in the final result of the presidential contest, it would likely feed into a pre-existing belief in the invalidity of the election- and foster a chaotic environment that could lead to violence” (Argentino). The 2020 presidential election was a point of contempt to QAnon believers. Many were thoroughly convinced that the election had been rigged, and that Trump had really