Mashable: QAnon believers go undercover to spread conspiracies online…and it’s working. “The reason you may not be seeing so much QAnon online isn’t because they’re not there. It’s because they’ve gone undercover. QAnon content is still spreading on mainstream social media platforms thanks to a number of tactics its believers are using to get around the bans.”
New York Times: Extremists Find a Financial Lifeline on Twitch. “QAnon adherents and other far-right influencers are making thousands of dollars broadcasting election and vaccine conspiracy theories on the streaming site.”
CNET: QAnon channels are deleting their own YouTube videos to evade punishment. “Disappearing videos are usually the realm of Snapchat or Instagram Stories, which self-destruct by design after 24 hours. The vanishing QAnon video is something different, a tactic used by peddlers of disinformation that’s designed to help extremist channels evade YouTube’s policies and escape violations that would get them shut down.”
Yahoo News: Report: China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories. “Foreign-based actors, principally in China and Russia, are spreading online disinformation rooted in QAnon conspiracy theories, fueling a movement that has become a mounting domestic terrorism threat, according to new analysis of online propaganda by a security firm. The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Facebook posts between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 originated from overseas administrators.”
CBS News: After years of trying to curb QAnon messaging, Twitter has now suspended more than 150,000 accounts. “While Twitter monitored, collected data and tried to suppress the reach of QAnon accounts, it had stopped short of outright banning them. That changed after the Capitol riot. On January 12, six days after the insurrection, Twitter publicly disclosed it had suspended 70,000 accounts. A Twitter spokesperson now tells CBS News the number has more than doubled — with more than 150,000 accounts suspended for engaging in ‘sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale.’”
Gizmodo: QAnon, CultTok, and Leaving It All Behind. “Culttok and similar fundamentalist religious defector TikTok accounts sort of feel like something between educational channels and therapeutic practice; they (often former Evangelicals and Mormons) affirm that they were completely engulfed by a very specific kind of dogmatic ideology. They recall how they rejected what they describe as alternative facts and prejudiced messaging. They discuss the challenges of breaking free and letting go.”
NPR: Unwelcome On Facebook And Twitter, QAnon Followers Flock To Fringe Sites. “The QAnon universe has two stars. There’s Q, the mysterious figure whose cryptic, evidence-free posts on anonymous online message boards spawned the baseless claim that a satanic cabal of pedophiles runs rampant in government and Hollywood. The other star is Trump, who was supposed to expose and defeat that cabal. But both figures have gone silent online…. And yet, even as the big social media platforms try to squash harmful misinformation and hate speech, the conspiracy has survived in the darker corners of the Internet.”
New York Times: A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling. “Every morning, Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer and actress, wakes up in her Upper East Side apartment; feeds her dog, Milo, and her cats, Marlena and Celeste; brews a cup of coffee; and sits down at her oval dining room table. Then, she opens her laptop and begins fighting the global cabal.”
NBC News: Online far-right movements fracture in wake of Capitol riot. “Online far-right movements are splintering in the wake of last week’s Capitol riot, as some radical anti-government movements show signs of disillusionment with the relatively hands-off approach of some QAnon conspiracy theorists amid warnings of future violence.”
Rolling Stone: Patreon Claimed They Kicked Conspiracy Theorists Off. QAnon Still Flourishes. “Both aspiring and well-established QAnon influencers are directly profiting off the paid subscription service platform Patreon, despite the website publicly cracking down on accounts pushing the conspiracy theory last winter. Rolling Stone found nearly a dozen examples of creators on the platform using language that identifies them as followers of QAnon, the far-right extremist conspiracy theory baselessly positing, among other things, that President Trump will arrest and execute a cadre of left-wing political figures who are secretly pedophiles.”
CNN: The QAnon conspiracy is fake. The harm it’s doing to child welfare groups is real. “Child welfare organizations for months have felt the full weight of the coronavirus pandemic, navigating concerns about unreported abuse and ensuring their resources are available to at-risk children. But now, deeper into the outbreak, a new challenge is emerging that’s complicating their critical outreach efforts: the QAnon conspiracy theory.”
The Conversation: On Twitter, bots spread conspiracy theories and QAnon talking points. “Americans who seek political insight and information on Twitter should know how much of what they are seeing is the result of automated propaganda campaigns. Nearly four years after my collaborators and I revealed how automated Twitter accounts were distorting online election discussions in 2016, the situation appears to be no better. That’s despite the efforts of policymakers, technology companies and even the public to root out disinformation campaigns on social media.”
NBC News: QAnon accounts make a dent in voting discussion on Twitter. “More than 1 in 50 tweets about voting in the 2020 elections in August and September were posted by QAnon accounts, according to research released Friday by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit.”
Insider: Etsy will remove all QAnon-related merchandise from the platform as tech companies fight the conspiracy theory’s growth. “Etsy’s QAnon content, which appears to already be absent from or unsearchable on the website [October 7], included shirts, bumper stickers, and jewelry.”
BBC: QAnon: YouTube moves to purge ‘harmful conspiracy theories’. “YouTube has become the latest social media giant to announce a sweeping crack down on content linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory. The company said it would ban material targeting a person or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify violence, such as QAnon.”
