Twitter announced Tuesday that the QAnon conspiracy theory has stopped working on its site, setting the stage to ban 7,000 QAnon accounts and limit the voice of approximately 150,000 more.
But the Twitter crackdown comes too late to stop QAnon’s growth. While QAnon’s presence on Twitter will almost certainly decrease after the movement, the movement he created on Twitter and other social media platforms has already moved into the real world, and has established a foothold in the Republican Party.
Before the killings, panicked QAnon believers have tried to evade Twitter bans by changing their spelling; now they claim that they instead support CueAnon or QANöN. A leading QAnon promoter who combines late-night conspiracy theories with evangelical Christianity, “Praying Medic” temporarily deactivated his account in hopes that Twitter will finally abandon its purge.
“The fledgling QAnon takeover on the right isn’t limited to just social media. Powered by a pandemic and a president who believes that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, QAnon and the conspiratorial thinking that generated it has never been so prominent.“
The Twitter crackdown has been portrayed as a major move against QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that postulates that top Democrats and anyone else who doesn’t like QAnon fans is a cannibal-pedophile (or, in his opinion, a “fart-vore” “) who will soon be arrested and executed by Trump.
Right-wing activists have traditionally seen their online influence dramatically curtailed, from anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer to InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But the QAnon crackdown appears to be less a total ban on any QAnon promotion, and more an attempt to reduce its circulation on the site.
Judging from Twitter’s description, for example, QAnon fans won’t necessarily be banned from the site. Instead, the new restrictions are aimed at removing accounts that are already breaking other Twitter rules, while also trying to prevent QAnon supporters from creating targeted mobs of harassment.
Meanwhile, in the real world, QAnon is not concerned about being banned. Its promoters win invitations to the White House, as the president retweets QAnon supporters and Trump’s social media chief Dan Scavino publishes a cartoon of QAnon advocate Ben Garrison. Presidential son Eric Trump recently released a QAnon chart with a giant “Q” on it, probably not a sign that Trump is a Q-head in the closet, but further evidence of QAnon’s ubiquity in the world MAGA.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn recently filmed himself swearing a QAnon oath with his family, enthusing QAnon supporters desperate to prove that their dream of mass executions will come true. All of these Trumpworld winks to QAnon come even when the FBI considers QAnon to be a source of internal terrorism.
QAnon’s rise to power in the real world is especially puzzling considering its origins: a handful of posts on the 4Chan message board in October 2017. The posts, by a still anonymous figure calling himself Q, They claimed that Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month.
That prediction did not come true, but those publications and the many “breadcrumbs” published since then have spawned a thriving and often lucrative far-right subculture. QAnon encompasses a wide range of beliefs, from anti-vaccine activism to, for some, the theory that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death to team up with Trump. But almost all QAnon believers agree with the basic tenets of the theory: that the world is controlled by a global cadre of pedophiles led by Democrats, and that Donald Trump is ready to arrest and execute them in a highly anticipated event called ” Storm”.
The fledgling QAnon takeover on the right isn’t limited to just social media. Powered by a pandemic and a president who believes that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, QAnon and the conspiratorial thinking that sparked it has never been more prominent. A QAnon believer who compared Q to Jesus won the Republican Senate nomination in Oregon. Another QAnon fan and congressional candidate is set to win a runoff in Georgia in a heavily Republican district, which means the conspiracy theory could soon be represented in the House next year.
Meanwhile, QAnon has begun to seep into American life in other unexpected ways. QAnon billboards have appeared across the country. A boxing coach appeared in a UFC broadcast emblazoned with QAnon slogans. The head of the New York City police union appeared on television with a QAnon mug in the background, an ominous nod to a theory based on vigilante justice.
Twitter’s offensive comes in a month when QAnon believers have flexed their muscles like never before on the platform, regularly taking control of Twitter’s trending topic feature to terrorize big business and celebrities, two keys to Twitter’s own growth.
The trend bar is supposed to tell Twitter users what matters on the site that day. Instead, QAnon fans used their numbers to invent a bizarre theory that the children were being traded and sold on the Wayfair furniture website. And they harassed celebrity Chrissy Teigen with unfounded accusations of pedophilia and cannibalism, until Teigen made her account private of the attack and said she feared for the safety of her family.
A Twitter spokesperson claimed that the QAnon crackdown, which includes efforts aimed at stopping the trend of QAnon hashtags, is not inspired by any particular incident.
“Based on lengthy research and further evaluation by our Trust and Security team, we have seen a marked trend for QAnon accounts to increase their coordination and swarm to disrupt public conversation through the service,” the spokesperson said on a statement.
The new Twitter restrictions could limit the spread of QAnon on the site, but they were late, according to Joan Donovan, director of research at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Policy and Public Policy at Harvard University. QAnon is well established on other social media, such as Facebook and TikTok, the popular youth social media app where the Pizzagate conspiracy theory adjacent to QAnon has flourished.
“Unless YouTube and Facebook quickly follow up with similar deletions, they will become a hive for this group that traffics in misinformation.“
– Joan Donovan
“These groups have strategically spread across numerous platforms to protect themselves from losing their network,” Donovan told The Daily Beast. “Ultimately, unless YouTube and Facebook quickly follow up with similar deletions, they will become a hive for this group that is dealing with political and medical disinformation.”
Leaving hashtags aside, there are even more obvious downsides to QAnon’s growth: families ruined, separated by a member’s conviction that Hillary Clinton eats children, or the swaths of Republican voters who are increasingly divorced from reality. .
There is also violence in the real world. A QAnon believer allegedly stabbed a Samurai sword into his brother’s head, convinced of the stories told by a splintered QAnon faction that the world was controlled by lizard people. Another allegedly shot the head of a mafia family in an attempt to take him to Trump’s legendary QAnon courts, ruining his own life in the process.
An Arizona military veteran who fell in love with QAnon now faces a long prison sentence after using an armored vehicle to close a bridge near the Hoover Dam to protest the QAnon tracks that had not come true.
Another man tried to burn Comet Ping Pong, the pizzeria in Washington. QAnon believers are convinced it is the center of a worldwide pedophile clique. The arson attempt could have killed countless customers, including children, if employees had not put out the fire. Two women have been charged with QAnon-related conspiracies to kidnap their own children.
So far, the Twitter purge has not spread to some of the QAnon leaders on the site. As of this writing, many of QAnon’s most visible accounts, including Jordan Sather, a QAnon promoter who encourages fans to consume a substance that the FDA warns is equivalent to taking bleach, are still active on the site.
Dustin Nemos, a prominent QAnon promoter who was banned from Twitter earlier this year, is confident that other QAnon believers will discover ways to stay on Twitter and continue to send his message through hashtags.
“Maybe they’ll just hijack a Pepsi hashtag or something,” said Nemos.
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