One reason QAnon won’t go away: It’s infiltrated mom groups

For those hopeful that QAnon believers will abandon the faith after Donald Trump’s failed re-election bid, the ideology’s deep inroads in mom groups and parenting communities across the world is proof the group isn’t going away any time soon.

Although QAnon began with an anonymous 4chan user claiming to have inside intelligence from within the highest echelons of American politics (there’s no proof of this), it quickly became a sprawling conspiracy theory that embraces practically any fringe idea. Some adherents push centuries-old anti-Semitic propaganda such as “blood libel,” a Middle Ages conspiracy theory invented by Christians to demonize Jewish people by claiming they used Christian blood in religious rituals. Others have convinced themselves Trump is waging a secret war against the global elite to usher in a new golden age. But most believe that at the root of society’s evil is a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles hell-bent on exploiting children.

While some QAnon influencers are typical grifters, using conspiracy theories to sell books, merchandise, Patreon subscriptions and more, many more are true believers. These individuals, who have worked themselves into a frenzy over imagined child exploitation, see it as part of their mission to “wake up” other people.

Kelly noticed this fixation on sexual predators aligned perfectly with the fear already common in parenting groups.

“It was really interesting how easily the content translated, because so much of the Facebook parenting forums are people posting warnings to other mums: ‘Watch out for this,’” she said. “It’s not all pedophile and sex related … but there’s always a slight paranoia about child trafficking.”

“QAnon believers only had to tweak that content very, very slightly,” she added.

Online forums that breed far-right extremism tend to be overwhelmingly male spaces, but part of QAnon’s potency comes from its wide-ranging appeal. Since a huge portion of its belief system revolves around the fear of child exploitation, it naturally began to skew toward worried moms. An entire sect of QAnon belief has branded itself “save the children,” creating a headache for the actual humanitarian aid organization. The rallying cry of “save the children” has become a popular way to introduce people to QAnon, since positioning the movement as anti-pedophilia makes it appear more palatable and less political.

Kelly is a veteran of attending far-right rallies, which in her experience tend to be white, male and middle-aged. When she went to her first London “save the children” rally in August, though, she was met by a very different crowd.

“I was really, really surprised by how many mothers and their children were there. It was very racially diverse, too,” she said. “Whatever QAnon was doing, it was tapping into a different market than traditional far-right conspiracy theories.”

When Kelly went digging into the social media profiles of the rally organizers, none of them had obvious ties to the extremist, often white nationalist, groups that commonly host far-right rallies. They were mostly women and almost all of them had side hustles selling multilevel marketing products.

“When your job is sitting on social media and posting all day … oh my gosh, so many more people are going to be radicalized by something,” Kelly said.

A Buzzfeed News investigation last year found a number of popular mom influencers began transitioning their content from design inspo and parenting tips to full-on QAnon conspiracies. Radicalization is happening faster than ever with social media, sometimes within weeks of first exposure. Like with any cult, however, people rarely sign on immediately to the group’s most extreme ideas. Often, they’re exposed first to “soft” QAnon theories, like save the children.

Q evangelists use real-world examples, like that of powerful sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, to point to documented child abuse. From there, they begin introducing more and more outrageous stories, some rooted in kernels of reality and others completely divorced from it. Once a person begins to question their accepted worldview — and decides mainstream narratives can’t be trusted — they become more susceptible to increasingly outlandish, baseless claims. (And for those who think this is an unprecedented level of mass delusion, look back at the 1980s Satanic Panic for examples of people who went to jail because of the hysteria around “satanism.”)

Even Facebook apparently knows its groups are creating a massive problem. A recent Wall Street Journal story reported that Facebook data scientists found 70% of its 100 most popular civic groups in the U.S. were “non-recommendable.” Common reasons were “calls to violence,” bullying and harassment and proliferating misinformation.

“Social media has this amazing self-siloing effect,” Kelly said. “Quite often what will happen in these groups is one admin or moderator will say, ‘It’s getting weird,’ and then they will make their own group. It also creates a self-radicalizing echo chamber in a way. You’ve taken away anyone who might push back against that.”

Kelly noticed that whenever she joins a Facebook parenting group, she gets dozens of friend requests from its members. She suspects online far-right researchers are often seeing just the tip of the iceberg, and that much of the intense, rapid radicalization happens in private messages, especially as social media companies crack down on QAnon content in their public spaces.

“Because they lost their platform and their footprint — at least their organizing engine — we’re beginning to see this shift to peer-to-peer channels,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning watchdog organization that studies conservative media.

While some QAnon believers who staked their worldview on Trump winning a second term are experiencing moments of doubt, the believers who are obsessed with fantasies of rampant, secret child sex trafficking have gone on relatively unfazed. They’re also spreading QAnon internationally, because their brand of conspiracy theory is less reliant on the machinations of an American president. It’s possible “save the children” may even become its own standalone subsect of QAnon, reliant not on messages from their anonymous information source but self-sustained with an endless stream of online fear-mongering among parenting groups and mom influencers.

“They’re incredibly useful for recruitment. It’s often men who make headlines because they kill someone or rise to a position of political prominence. But women are always there,” Kelly said.

“QAnon’s cleverness has been not to prescribe along gender lines, which has opened themselves up to the biggest pool of people. And you can have these women front and foremost.”