QAnon, a year after Q
There was no text on ‘drop’ 4953, posted around a month after the previous message, just a link to a music YouTube video.
For a movement ignited by lengthy and byzantine clues, the final Q message, released exactly a year ago, felt like an anticlimax.
Nor was there any sign off from Q, the alleged high-ranking government employee, whose three-years’ worth of posts had helped build massive online communities of self-proclaimed researchers across the world. QAnon, as the movement came to be known, had for months been prophesying a huge win for Donald Trump in the November 2020 US election. When the opposite transpired, the posts just vanished. For some QAnon believers the loss proved a sharp snap back to reality — akin to a millenarian cult surviving its own end-of-the-world prediction.
For others, however, it would be the beginning of an entirely new era.
The ideology’s impact — both on those directly exposed to its many variants, and on the wider conspiracy theory ecosystem — lives on, even without Q himself.
Describing the exact parameters of the surviving movement is difficult. QAnon was never a stagnant phenomenon to begin with. The first posts date back to October 2017, but by the time mainstream coverage had picked up on the movement in 2020, it had already evolved significantly into a number of independent strands.
Part 1: The future of ‘QAnon proper’
Today’s surviving mega conspiracy can be loosely divided into at least three relatively distinct flavours.
First there is “QAnon proper”, still rooted in a Make America Great American mentality. This strand continues to focus on the deep state and Donald Trump’s heroic stance against it, with fantastical concepts like the return of JFK Jr for the next election cycle.
Then there is a pastel or lower-case Q. This represents QAnon ideologies which have been distilled into health, wellness and spirituality spaces (typically focusing more attention on child protection).
The new form, which emerged last November, is linked to the Stop The Steal movement. Just like with ‘QAnon proper’, this focuses on the US election being rigged by the Democrats, but includes even whackier elements like the belief that Joe Biden has actually been replaced by a clone. Then there are endless international varieties, which borrow parts of other strains and infuse them with local sensibilities.
‘QAnon proper’, the oldest part of the movement, and perhaps the best known, had the closest link to the Q drops — members either engaged with the text directly, or through aggregators and forums where they could post and discuss ideas.
For now that part of the movement is not growing, says Mike Rains who runs the Adventures in HellwQrld podcast and tracks the conspiracy theory.
“The things that radicalised people were either the actual Q drops and the movement burgeoning from 2017 to 2020, and then it got a secondary shot in the arm in 2020 when you had Covid and you had the presidential election,” says Rains. “In 2021, there really hasn’t been anything to push people into it — politics is basically cut and dry.”
The last great event was the failed insurrection on January 6 (a string of other proposed dates have also all fallen through, with accusations from within QAnon that many were sting operations). Even so QAnon proper groups on Telegram, despite taking a recent hit, remain strong even in the face of disillusionment.
Rains describes a poll by a major QAnon promoter, posted in August, asking when users converted to the ideology. The year 2020 received around a quarter of the votes, while 2021 only got 1 per cent. “Nobody’s joining the movement right now because there’s no incentive,” says Rains.
But even if ‘QAnon proper’ is facing tough times, there are still a large number of individuals who buy into its beliefs. “I think that the legacy of QAnon is that you’ve created this ready-made audience of people that are susceptible to conmen coming in and telling them what they want to hear,” says Rains.
The world of QAnon has always been a big tent, with its various ringleaders cajoling both existing conspiracy theories and new myths.
In its first iteration, focused on Donald Trump’s imagined war against Satanic paedophiles, the super-conspiracy rarely excluded any strains of conspiratorial thought. Its theories touched on everything from aliens and fairies to explicit white nationalism and the harder line anti-vaxx movement (such as those who believe that the vaccine is being used to microchip the population).
The absence of QAnon as a central, undisputed text for followers to believe, however, has had an impact. There’s growing infighting between what Rains jokingly dubs “serious QAnon”, or those who attempt to maintain optimism in the narrative created by the Q drops, and more explicit grifters, who are exploiting the gullible group for personal gain.
“For the other guys trying to play the longer game, they don’t like these characters trying to make a fast buck,” says Rains.
Joe Ondrak, head of investigations at counter-misinformation group Logically says the factionalisation was predictable. “This isn’t based on any kind of offline action or optics, this is very much based in a feud that is inevitable: this thing has gone on so long without any central direction unifying people, there is a power vacuum.”
The recent gathering of Q followers at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza to greet John F Kennedy Junior’s triumphant return on the basis his death was faked is both evidence of the continued power of QAnon’s ideology, and the pressures of factionalisation.
JFK Jr only appears in four Q drops from 2018, with one post from December that year even ruling out his survival (although Q suggested that the plane crash which killed him in 1999 was not an accident).
Nevertheless, the belief he’s still alive has been a consistent part of QAnon thought. In Dallas, the theory has been exploited by Texan Michael Protzman who posts on Telegram and other platforms under the name Negative48. A man who even other QAnon groups have accused of cultish behaviour and reliance on esoteric aspects such as a numerology.
“It wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a power vacuum going on,” says Ondrak.
Chine Labbe, managing editor and vice-president of partnerships for Europe at Newsguard, which monitors and rates news websites’ trustworthiness, also says the Dallas group reflects the most extreme end of QAnon’s ongoing appeal despite constant disappointment.
“What is quite striking is that a core still believes in big events like the arrival of JFK Junior after so many promises of things that were going to happen — such as Hillary Clinton’s arrest, Trump winning the election and his forecasted return to office.”
Annie Kelly, UK correspondent for the QAnon Anonymous Podcast which reports on the conspiracy theory, says that for those who have invested time, money and potentially even relationships into the ideology, one mechanism to maintain their belief has been to reimagine the QAnon struggle as a spiritual battle against literal demons, not merely a struggle against Satanist cabals.
“The spiritual warfare was always there, but it certainly seems to have gained a new prominence — it’s a way of reorienting your beliefs without ever actually having to walk back any of them.”
Overseas, where there has always been a looser relationship with Q drops, QAnon-inspired movements remain potent, says Labbe. In France and Germany, she has seen an international spread of rhetoric borrowed from the Stop The Steal movement — which buys into Trump’s ongoing claims of widespread voter fraud while often overlapping with other QAnon beliefs.
“We have seen claims that [president Emmanuel] Macron’s administration is already trying to suppress votes and steal the election,” says Labbe. “A year later it’s not just the group in Dallas, though that’s very worrying and concerning: it’s also how these more global narratives about elites trying to rig democracy merge with other groups which are sceptical about power in general. That’s far wider than a hardcore group of the most extremist QAnon followers.”
Part 2: An incredibly democratic conspiracy theory
QAnon’s legacy is not limited to those traditions and ideas directly borrowed from its framework. It has also marked an evolution in how conspiracy theories form, mutate and spread, providing an exemplar for future cases. “QAnon was, at least in the West, our first major collaborative interactive conspiracy theory,” says Kelly. “It was designed by committee, it’s an incredibly democratic conspiracy theory.”
That democratic, iterative process helped create a “conspiracy language designed by and for social media,” says Kelly, allowing QAnon terminology to be injected into even largely disconnected conspiracy theories.
Terms like “deep state” or “Satanic paedophiles” are brought up casually, especially in vaccine hesitant communities, she says, treated as a kind of technical jargon. “That language almost seems like an easy way to grab people emotionally.”
“The difference from previous conspiracy theories is that QAnon has an almost free-market like nature,” adds Ondrak. “The Q drops were so opaque and open to interpretation that they were the conspiracy itself, while bakers [the term QAnon truth-seekers give to themselves] were like the people writing the books. Whoever had the best interpretation won out.”
Another factor underpinning the success of the model is adherents’ heavy use of messaging/broadcasting app Telegram, says Jordan Wildon, another digital investigator at Logically. “There’s this absolute networked way of spreading things which makes it super easy for stuff to move around, so everyone can comment and build up an idea together.”
Telegram has a variety of different spaces, ranging from channels which allow their operators to blast messages to theoretically unlimited numbers of subscribers, through to supergroups of up to 200,000 members, down to regular groups with just 200 people. Regardless of the group’s nature, users can easily share content between them, creating a powerful force of cross-pollination — and allowing users to have a say in the shape of QAnon.
It also means that content can easily find its way out of QAnon circles and into other conspiracy theories.
Other platforms have cultivated conspiracy theories too. Tumblr was a vector in its heyday, as are image boards such as 4chan (where QAnon originated) and 8kun (which became the home for Q drops). Facebook too was famously afflicted. But Telegram’s design offers multiple pull factors, says Wildon: “There’s no real threat of [QAnon content] being moderated . . . it’s on your phone, anyone can have an account.”
Part 3: The future of conspiracy theories
Just as QAnon proliferated, so has the world of amateur counter-misinformation. On Twitter, you can’t throw a stone without finding a hot take on QAnon as part of a grand Russian “PSYOP” — a move that has echoes of some of the tall tales around psychometrics in 2016. Misinformation can have a major impact on individuals, but it also plays on existing biases — it is not necessarily a type of brainwashing.
The popular image of the conspiracy theorist is a figure like the QAnon Shaman Jake Angeli, who was photographed on the January 6 riot clad in a pseudo-native American headdress and red, white and blue war paint.
But Kelly emphasises that conspiratorial thinking is not limited to fringe groups. “People think of conspiracy theorists as lone lunatics in tinfoil hats in a mountainside somewhere but the truth is that conspiracy theories aren’t outside of our culture.”
Concerns over the concentration of power in the hands of established groups are not limited to QAnon of course (nor are they unwarranted). But as Abbie Richards, who studies disinformation and extremism on TikTok, argues, QAnon reduces them to a story book narrative. “It’s a fairytale so you can’t have a policy [response to systemic issues]. You can’t tax the Deep State.”
While ‘QAnon proper’ content does still make an appearance on TikTok, Richards says esoteric videos are more popular. And even with QAnon material — or that of Pizzagate, which promoted similar themes — the content can seem less about politics than the narratives themselves.
“My intuition is that Gen Z is much more into this escapist storytelling aspect of conspiracy theories,” says Richards. “It seems like they’ve been inside for so long in their formative years; their leaders aren’t addressing climate change, there are wild amounts of wealth disparity [so] they’re turning to various escapist narratives that offer a good story over real solutions.”
Richards points to escapist content on TikTok, such as popular videos which promote shifting your consciousness into other fictional worlds, such as the magical one inhabited by Harry Potter.
She also sees similar patterns of ‘research’ in the true-crime community, who devour content about real word criminal cases ranging from podcasts like Serial to mini-series on TikTok itself. Richards describes cases of users poring over videos to find supposed evidence of criminal behaviour, and even seeking out those on social media who they believe are guilty.
Most recently the Astroworld tragedy, which led to 10 deaths at a concert by rapper Travis Scott, has cultivated its own mythology too, says Richards. “In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy you saw Satanic conspiracy theories that this was a ritual or sacrifice, rather than dealing with the deeper issues that caused this.”
All of this also reflects an establishment failure to grapple with QAnon as it grew in popularity. “The real mistake was discrediting the possibility that Q would be a threat based on the content of the ideology and not on observable data on how popular it was getting and how quickly,” says Ondrak’s colleague Al Baker, editorial director at Logically.
In a mirror of the 2016 treatment of the Trump presidential campaign, coverage of QAnon could often be more parodic than inquiring. The assumption that ‘rational people’ would scoff at the beliefs is a patronising approach, grounded in Richard Hofstadter’s idea of a minority afflicted by the “paranoid style” outnumbered by right-thinking citizens.
“It’s not like people who believe in QAnon or other conspiracy theories are objectively crazy in most cases,” says Wildon. “They’re holding on to something to have something to believe in.”
The actions of commentators, researchers and reporters in othering the group through surface-level comedy has ironically helped to create a more solid community, he says. “If they had babbled away quietly, and didn’t get boosted in the way it did it’s more likely to have died out. It wasn’t just the people who legitimately believed in it, this is a failing of all of us.”
The answer to QAnon and its successor does not lie in comedy skits and mockery — because even if the ideas are risible, it is clear that this approach does not work. “People who believe this were confronted with the first piece of information that hooked them in,” says Ondrak. “Something that was missed in a way of addressing QAnon is understanding why people choose to believe this, and what social failings have led enough people to choose this.”
Labbe at Newsguard says that media literacy can also play a part, though not just for the wrong thinkers in QAnon and other well-known conspiracy theories. “That means students, but also elderly folks and adults, to understand what cognitive biases purveyors of misinformation prey on to make us believe in what we end up believing in.”
And it is vital that the lesson from QAnon and other conspiracy theories is not to promote the idea that simply spreading more “authoritative voices” will cure the “infodemic” (in itself a term under debate).
The pandemic has been littered by missteps. Governments have performed endless U-turns; reputable sources like The Lancet have retracted research; and journalists have frequently jumped to conclusions not supported by the data. Without interrogating where orthodox voices have failed, we are doomed to endless QAnons.
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