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Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Reuters One post on a 4Chan message board on the morning of Oct. 30th, 2017, saying that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, written by an anonymous user who would become known as ‘Q’, soon exploded into a group known today as QAnon. The Daily Beast …
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There comes a moment in every new Q follower’s life when the person closest to them realizes that they aren’t joking. The Facebook binges and the sudden adoration for Donald Trump have been waved off until now. The stray remarks about missing children and experimental vaccines have been chalked up …
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Austin Steinbart lured in roughly a dozen dedicated disciples with a messianic story of his past, living a life “complete with a compound, guns, bitter internal feuds, and showdowns with federal law enforcement,” Will Sommer writes in his forthcoming book, Trust the Plan, a stranger-than-fiction …
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Right-wing radio host and Fox News contributor Dan Bongino praised and promoted a known QAnon influencer while discussing the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. On his show, Bongino gave a “hat tip” to Kanekoa, a QAnon supporter and member of the QAnon influencer collective We The …
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Will Sommer. Photograph by Jeff Elkins Growing up in Texas, Will Sommer was a conservative, listening to Rush Limbaugh broadcasts and Ayn Rand audiobooks on family road trips. His politics changed when he went to college, but his obsession with conservative media never dimmed. “I was fascinated by …
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Against the backdrop of a still-accelerating pandemic in 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California published a paper describing their work with GPT-3, an early iteration of the language model that …
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Meta has allowed a page that is dedicated to a QAnon-supporting Roku channel to launch ads on its platforms, despite the company’s crackdown on QAnon content. It comes as Roku has not taken any action against the channel, even though the company promised to look into it, as it seemingly violates …
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As the companies have shed jobs recently, many teams assigned to combat false and misleading information have taken a hit. SAN FRANCISCO — YouTube, like other social media platforms, spent years expanding its efforts to tackle misinformation after the 2016 election. It hired policy experts and …
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Dispatches From Q-Land is an occasional Paste series delving into the seamy underbelly of the QAnon conspiracy theory on right-wing social media platforms such as Parler, Gab, Truth Social and Telegram. It’s a disturbing task, but only by paying attention to these dangerous extremists can we …
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On 7 December 2022, Germany witnessed an attempted coup d’état that illustrated the current tendency for extremist ideologies to converge. In this case, the coup was planned by the Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich), a highly heterogeneous movement led by traditionalists, Querdenken (anti-vaxx), …
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