Will deplatforming make QAnon and the far-right fade away or radicalise further?

As President Joe Biden was sworn in this week, QAnon forums descended into despair, confusion and wounded anger.

“It’s over and nothing makes sense,” read one message thread title on the largest of these forums.

“He sold us out,” a believer wrote.

“It’s revolution time.”

Earlier that day, as Donald Trump departed the White House, another wrote, “It simply doesn’t make sense that we all got played.”

It’s fair to say those who follow the QAnon conspiracy theory, which held that Mr Trump would retain power, bring down the “deep state” and expose a far-reaching child-sex-trafficking ring, are shocked right now.

Believers (who are estimated to number in the millions) are grappling with the reality of President Biden and the very public failure of their prophecy.

But as the new Commander-in-Chief calls for an end to “this uncivil war”, there are big questions around what happens to QAnon and the rest of the far-right — where does the pent-up and frustrated energy of that movement go?

This is a political question, but also a tech one.

Having delayed action for years, tech companies were decisive after the Capitol was stormed. They quickly removed, banned or effectively took offline large chunks of the far-right internet. This action is now called the ‘Great Deplatforming’.

But will QAnon followers and other Trump supporters linger in an online netherworld of ‘alt-tech’ chat forums?

Will they vanish or — concentrated in these small private groups — be radicalised further?

Marked decrease in posts inciting violence

Two weeks after the Great Deplatforming experiment, it seems to have had profound, measurable effects.

On January 6, insurrectionists stormed the US capitol and disrupted the confirmation of election results in the House and Senate.

Shortly after, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites announced their removal of President Donald Trump’s accounts due to concerns of further incitement to violence.

That same week, Amazon, Apple and Google severed business ties with Parler — a platform that advertises itself as a conservative free-speech platform — to prevent a continued spread of “dangerous and illegal content”.

Next, Facebook deleted reams of content alleging election fraud and Twitter banned tens of thousands of QAnon-related accounts.

These actions are part of the reason why Q followers are now lamenting the inauguration of President Biden in out-of-the-way chat forums, as opposed to whipping up a storm on mainstream social media.

Advance Democracy, a Washington-based organisation that combs social media for posts inciting violence or spreading misinformation and conspiracy theory, recorded a drop in these kinds of posts after the Great Deplatforming and in the lead-up to Inauguration Day.

Of note, there were hundreds of thousands fewer QAnon tweets compared to the barrage two weeks earlier.

“Much of the content explicitly promoting violence has been removed from the mainstream platforms online,” the head of the organisation, Daniel J. Jones said.

“After actions by Twitter, Facebook and others, there is far-less organising occurring on open channels.

But Mr Jones, a former US Senate staffer who led the investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, urges caution.

“The possibility of violence being planned on closed channels exists,” he added.

“We have seen numerous QAnon accounts move to [social networking platform] Gab and calls for violence on unmoderated and closed channels.”

A malaise of distrust and disillusionment

Other experts are noticing a similar trend.

From his office near New York, veteran intelligence analyst Chris Sampson has been patiently infiltrating the private forums and spying on the online conversations of extremist far-right groups for more than a decade.

He said the deplatforming had dramatically limited the ability of far-right groups to reach a mainstream audience, which means some groups would struggle to recruit new members and may dwindle and vanish.

But there’s the possibility some have been pushed further into the shadows.

“We have to monitor where these guys go and how it changes their dialogue,” he said.

He described an atmosphere of intense distrust pervading the far-right forums.

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Suspected traitors and federal agents are being sniffed out and new users asked to verify their identity through sending a copy of their drivers licence.

Calls to attend rallies (including ones around Inauguration Day) are being roundly dismissed as “fedposting” — that is, an attempt by federal agents to get members to gather in one place where they can be arrested.

The relative absence of violence on Inauguration Day was not so much a consequence of deplatforming, but of this general malaise of distrust and disillusionment, Mr Sampson said.

“They’re actually suspicious of groups who are calling for action — they believe they’re being set up. I think they’re confused,” he said.

“Mr Trump saying ‘let’s not have any violence’ disappointed a lot of folks — some even called for him to be executed.

“That’s incredible when you think that a few days earlier he was their mascot.

“They’re kind of leaderless.”

Fears of a neo-Nazi recruitment drive

Despite the apparent disarray and loss of faith exhibited on the message boards, there are already signs that groups are reorganising and uniting.

Former Parler accounts have shifted to the encrypted messaging platform Telegram as well as other apps.

Telegram downloads increased 146 per cent between January 5-10, becoming the 5th most downloaded app in the US by January 12.

White supremacist and pro-Trump discussion groups have seen membership balloon to tens of thousands. (In some cases this has made them unworkable, with the rapid sequence of new messages being almost impossible to read.)

Meanwhile, neo-Nazis discuss ways to infiltrate less extremist chat groups and “redpill” or radicalise what they call “Parler refugees”.

A recent report describes this process in some detail:

One extremist channel with a large number of subscribers shared a message that laid out a detailed redpilling guide. In short, it proposes mapping “normie Trump” Telegram chats to identify key members in the network, striking up friendly conversations with these individuals followed by a pre-constructed message (which I will avoid providing here) containing links to propaganda, and finally, providing a list of extremist Telegram channels that they should further explore.

In effect, neo-Nazis are taking advantage of the fracturing and disillusionment of QAnon to attempt to grow their numbers.

Independent far-right researcher Kaz Ross has watched Telegram go from a “quiet corner of neo-Nazis” to something more frenetic.

“It’s kind of crazy over there right now,” she said.

“You don’t look at a group for a few minutes and then you go back and there’s 23,000 new messages.”

The whack-a-mole problem

Much of what has happened in recent weeks has been predictable.

Experience shows that when extremist groups lose their platforms they tend to grow more toxic as they shrink.

In late June 2020, Reddit shut down sub-reddit message boards where toxic language had been common, including a notorious subreddit called r/The_Donald. The users regrouped at a separate website, which allowed researchers to observe how the rhetoric of their posts had changed.

They found a marked decrease in the number of followers on the new website, but “substantial evidence” the community had become more toxic. In particular, Trump supporters were increasingly fixated on outsiders.

Several months later, Trump supporters on that separate website played a key role in inciting and organising the storming of the Capitol.

A similar process of concentration and radicalisation appears to be happening now with the broader deplatforming, said Mr Sampson.

Every time a group is deplatformed, it reforms with fewer members, he said.

“If we whack ’em down at 1500, then in 24 hours they create a new one and they have 200.”

Participants in these groups compete to be the most radical.

“The more it becomes an echo chamber, the more nodding of agreement there is among participants,” Mr Sampson said.

“Then the edge-lording competition goes on and whoever is the most radical gets more follows and more attention.”

Why didn’t they deplatform earlier?

Some of the most radical, however, have apparently capitulated.

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Ron Watkins, the former administrator for the QAnon message board 8kun, who has fanned the flames of the far-right hoax for over three years, posted a note to his more than 100,000 followers: “We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able.”

In these uncertain times, whether that will happen is hard to say.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from ABC News can be found here ***