When Barack Obama recently told a rally in Pennsylvania that, were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be elected, they – we – would no longer have to worry about “the crazy things” Donald Trump and his supporters say, he was addressing a thirsty crowd in need of reassurance that a cool draught of sensible was on its way.
“You’ll be able to go about your lives,” Obama said, “knowing that the president is not going to retweet conspiracy theories about secret cabals ruling the world … Think about that: the president of the United States retweeted that. What! What?!”
Think about that, indeed. For most of us, the idea that a president, or indeed anyone else, might support the followers of a theory that high-profile celebrities, Obama among them, are involved in a global paedophile ring; channelling kidnapped children through underground tunnels and pizza parlours; harvesting their organs, and getting high on an adrenal byproduct of their terror, is a “What! What?!” moment.
Or perhaps this, too, is part of our new normal. “There is currently a monumental military operation going down, lead [sic] by POTUS to uncover these children, arrest those involved, and stop this evil once and for all. What you are seeing is a war. An invisible war that Trump keeps talking about. It’s a war between Trump ‘The Alliance’ and the elites, bankers and mainstream media.” This quote comes from a QAnon conspiracy post circulating on Facebook – despite crackdowns by the social media platform. We are all standing outside the Overton window of acceptable ideas, wondering if we will ever be able to get back indoors.
QAnon is a wide-ranging and baseless internet conspiracy theory that has been on the fringes of rightwing internet communities for years, but its visibility has exploded in recent months amid the social unrest and uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic.
QAnon has its roots in previously established conspiracy theories, some relatively new and some a millennium old. QAnon evolved out of Pizzagate and includes many of the same basic characters and plotlines without the easily disprovable specifics.
But QAnon also has its roots in much older antisemitic conspiracy theories. The idea of the all-powerful, world-ruling cabal comes straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document used throughout the 20th century to justify antisemitism. Another QAnon canard is a modern remix of the age-old antisemitic blood libel.
“Q”, posing as a government insider with top security clearance, has made more than 4,000 posts so far. Cryptic and elliptical, they often consist of a long string of leading questions designed to guide readers toward discovering the “truth” for themselves through “research”. It’s a kind of participatory internet scavenger hunt with perceived high stakes and a ready-made community of fellow adherents.
Experts in conspiracy theories point out belief in QAnon is far from common. The largest Facebook groups had approximately 200,000 members in them before Facebook banned them. When Twitter took similar action, it limited features for approximately 150,000 accounts.
While most QAnon followers will not engage in violence, many already have, or have attempted to, which is why the FBI identified the movement as a potential domestic terror threat. Participation in QAnon also often involves vicious online harassment campaigns against perceived enemies, which can have serious consequences for the targets.
QAnon is gaining traction as a political force in the Republican party in the US. Media Matters has compiled a list of 77 candidates for congressional seats who have indicated support for QAnon and at least one of them, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, will in all likelihood be elected in November 2020.
If this is your first introduction to the ideas behind QAnon, you may be incredulous. Maybe, like Obama, your response is to mock the people sharing its ideas. But that would be wrong. Ideas don’t go away just because not everyone believes in them. And we have centuries of evidence on the persistence of conspiracies as ideas – and the persistence of what feeds conspiracy beliefs: fear of “the other” translated into racism and antisemitism; a reactionary response to cultural change; a fight response to feeling out of control during societal crisis.
For me, the worry is less that the US president is circulating conspiracy theories, but how quickly QAnon ideas were seeded through millions of individual Facebook users this summer, grooming some from vaguely reactionary to off-the-scale truther. The mutability of QAnon’s ideas and its reach through Facebook has been able to sweep up so many people across the UK to march to #SaveOurChildren or rally against mask-wearing.
For the past five years, my research has looked at how strangers talk to each other about politics on Facebook. Focused on four constituencies through three general elections, I tracked public conversations between individuals through politicians’ Facebook pages. I watched the increased polarisation of those conversations, and with it increased partisanship and sectarianism. The largely civil debates I saw in 2015 were mostly gone by 2017. In 2019, I was struck by how memes were replacing discussion with ideology, and how radical ideas from ultra-right US Facebook pages were being circulated via individuals in these constituencies.
Returning to Facebook and those same local party pages this summer, I expected to see pro-Trump, anti-media, anti-migrant posts on some of the further-right pages in my watchlist, and I did. But honestly, even after five years of lurking in other people’s filter bubbles, I wasn’t ready for the stream of anti-everything anger I saw, nor for how easily conspiracy-driven ideas were crisscrossing the Atlantic (and the Pacific) via Facebook’s algorithms favouring negativity and outrage.
Facebook user J had shared the QAnon post cited above on her feed. J is in Wales but the post came from “Mama Wolf” in the US. J had been liking and sharing anti-migrant content from Ukip Brighton and Hove, now she was connected to Mama Wolf and both were sharing pro-Trump, anti-Democrat, anti-media, anti-vaxxer, anti-mask wearing, anti-Black Lives Matter protests memes.
But Facebook users such as J are not the ones who worry me most. Conspiracy theories play on fears of powerlessness and QAnon’s focus on “saving” children has helped it reach people who may otherwise be invulnerable to more directly political conspiracy, such as the worried mums sharing warnings about coughing children being forcibly taken away – #WakeUp they are urged (a QAnon call tag). Only a few steps can take a Facebook user from sharing the LOL doll videos, to signing off with #SaveOurChildren and initiating algorithms to send them next-level content about a war against paedophiles.
What’s particularly concerning is that we just do not know how many Facebook users are being exposed to QAnon ideas. The bubble communities we each inhabit on Facebook shield us from alternative views to our own; we do not see what we are not already predisposed to see. We are less likely to see what our neighbour or sister or colleague is seeing.
Once, we watched the news on TV; we saw wars and children starving and, while our thinking about the why or how of those events varied, that they were happening was a shared truth. Now we inhabit a world in which anyone – even a president – might ask us to believe events are happening that we can’t see, purely on the basis that the media is hiding it from us.
Only seeing the headline “crazy things” about QAnon makes it easy for us to dismiss it from the safety of our cognitive bubbles. But the threat from QAnon is that it further erodes the link between what we can see to be true and what we will believe to be true. The problem is not that if someone believes QAnon’s crazy things, they’ll believe anything, but that QAnon gives them permission to choose not to believe anyone. Truth is what their gut tells them, and reality is a choice.
Sue Greenwood teaches journalism at York St John University and writes about democracy and the media
