QAnon has gone from fringe conspiracy to full-blown cult

Rather than trying to analyze the spread of the conspiracy theory across online platforms, attempting to predict how it may change based on previous patterns may reveal more insight into the appeal of the conspiracy itself. In essence, the QAnon conspiracy is successful because of factors that scholars who research persuasion are wholly familiar with:

1. It provides an easy-to-process story to explain a horrible event or facet of society (child trafficking);
2. Its persuasiveness is steeped in emotional/affective appeals;
3. Belief provides a sense of community, group belonging, and a feeling of agency.

QAnon isn’t successful just because it provides information to make sense of the world, but also because it allows its believers to shape the narrative beyond the initial story.

This means that in a new political era with new platforms, the conspiracy has evolved from being focused on Hillary Clinton to attempting to implicate singers like Justin Bieber. It has grown beyond being a Democratic-led pedophile ring based out of a pizza restaurant to include long-held fears about Satanic cults (popular in the 1980s and 1990s) and cannibalism, and even organ harvesting. In some way, the QAnon conspiracy isn’t appealing because it’s a coherent narrative but because it’s a grab-bag of moral panics that have all been squashed together to create a rat-king conspiracy that contains multitudes. Believers can then pick and choose which parts of the conspiracy they most strongly align with, the pieces they choose to spread, and more importantly, what they choose to build upon. Conspiracy theory communities have always to some extent bled into one another, but the Internet has taken it to a new level, giving room for these beliefs to spread but also allowing people to engage at a level of co-construction and co-evolution that is difficult to keep up with.

Conspiracy theories, and especially ones like QAnon, reflect not just alternative epistemologies but also a form of collective consciousness and intelligence. This is where something like QAnon can stop being considered a conspiracy theory and may more accurately be said to resemble a cult or new religious movement. Unpacking what makes the conspiracy theory so wildly popular points us to the basic sociological concept of functionalism: for believers, it gives them a sense of meaning and a purpose to life; helps to reinforce social stability; is an agent of social control and behavior; and motivates them to work for social change. For their part, QAnon adherents believe that they are fighting for a better world vis-à-vis the elimination of child trafficking and exposure of pedophiles. The use of children as political pawns has been a long-standing tactic to advance political goals, and this strategy works well for QAnon believers: to try and argue against them can be turned against the speaker by claiming that they must then support child trafficking.