We Are Not Going to Fact-Check Our Way Out of QAnon

This is an excellent interview again shining light on how it is that more and more of us are being pulled into conspiracy theories and groups like QAnon. I believe that it's important to dive deeply into our research, which empowers us to bare witness to what is happening in our nation and world with compassion and awareness and without being pulled into the darkness of judgment, blame and shame, hatred and dehumanization. Humanity is in such great need for consciousness, compassion, wisdom, and love. May we meet the confusion and harm that is happening in our world with these qualities. May we be the peace we all yearn for. — Molly

Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mark Meadows

"You don't have a movement like this without people who've

lost trust in expertise and authority and institutions."

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

In October 2017, a user of the notoriously foul online message board 4chan, known as “Q,” posted a conspiracy theory that would change the future of American politics. Among the theory’s ever-metastasizing catalog of claims: A cabal of Satan-worshiping, child-trafficking pedophiles and cannibals seeking to dominate the world are plotting against President Trump, who at some appointed time called “The Storm” will expose these criminals and restore America to greatness.

If its absurdity initially lent the theory an air of humor, it has since worn off. Last year, the F.B.I. designated the group a potential domestic terrorism threat. As of this week, 56 percent of Republicans believe that QAnon is partly or mostly true, compared to 9 percent of Democrats, according to one (somewhat controversial) poll. And this November, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon believer with a history of bigoted statements who won a Republican congressional primary in Georgia, will almost certainly be elected to the House of Representatives.

To understand the rise of QAnon and what to do about it, I got in touch with my colleague Charlie Warzel, an Opinion writer at large who has covered the issue extensively.

[Read More: What Is QAnon, the Viral pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory?]

Can you talk a bit about how a fringe conspiracy theory went from an online message board to the heart of our national politics in less than three years?

In my mind it’s a story that has everything to do with the dynamics of the internet and the ecosystem that these platforms have built. You have this thing that starts off as a fringe conspiracy theory on a website that’s home to a lot of white supremacists and pornography and some of the most awful stuff on the internet. But it gains some traction because the initial conspiracy theory was predicated on this idea that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic globalist establishment are really corrupt. There’s a nugget in it that is politically resonant with the people who chant, “Lock her up,” at Trump rallies.

So QAnon went from a couple of posts on message boards to people talking about it via YouTube channels. And to some degree, that sanitizes it because it’s taken out of that really toxic environment. And thanks to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, if you’re looking at some Trump content, you might get pushed to a video about the deep state or corruption or “Russiagate.” And the algorithm will push you further to more extreme stuff as you exhaust that content until you get to QAnon. The conversation then moves to Facebook, and Facebook is even more palatable than YouTube, so it hits an older audience, and then communities spring up around it.

The social platforms give things that are very, very incendiary outsize impact and power and engagement. People latch onto this because it has emotional resonance, and they find out that it acts as real grist for the viral mill. And some of them are true believers, a lot of them are opportunists, but it doesn’t really matter.

We’ve seen this again and again and again with online conspiracy theories, where these platforms help strip the message of its original context. I really think if more people knew that QAnon originated on the same types of forums that are just rife with anti-Semitism and misogyny and white supremacist language and harassment and pornographic content and grisly crime scene photos and all those types of awful things, there would be a lot more caution around it.

At the risk of stating the obvious, conspiracy theories aren’t a new phenomenon in American politics. Ryan Grim at The Intercept recently talked about how an early-20th-century conspiracy theory about white girls being sold into sex slavery led to the creation of the F.B.I., and there are some eerie parallels there with how QAnon has started to hijack “save the children” rhetoric. QAnon also recycles a lot of themes from archetypal anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In what ways do you think QAnon is unique to the age of social media, and in what ways do you think it’s not?

It’s always been very cathartic for a group of people who feel angry, frustrated, alienated — whatever it is — to attribute their frustration not to a very large system that doesn’t care about them and has left them behind but to malice, and to say that, ‘No, it’s actually corruption of the highest order, this goes straight to the top.”

And that works in tandem with the idea that there are conspiracies in the world, you know, there is government corruption, there is child trafficking. All these things exist. But often they manifest in the most boring possible way. Part of the reason QAnon got supercharged in the past year or so was the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, a real-world event that added a lot of juice to the movement.

Now, I think it’s different than other conspiracies because of the way in which these platforms all work in concert. QAnon has kind of absorbed lots of other conspiracy theories into this larger umbrella movement that weaves them together into this grander explanation of how the world works. QAnon wants to be a home for everyone.

When you talk to people who’ve really been studying this movement, they say it gives people purpose in their lives. And if all those people feel like people without a country, platforms like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter give them forums and help them find each other. And once they’ve found each other, it just becomes a way of life.

Julia Carrie Wong recently reported for The Guardian that Marjorie Taylor Greene received campaign donations from many powerful Republican figures and organizations, including one connected to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. To what extent do you hold social media companies responsible for the rise of QAnon, and to what extent do you see it as symptomatic of some deeper sickness in American social and political life?

Oh, it’s 100 percent a combination of the two. You don’t have a movement like this without people who’ve lost trust in expertise and authority and institutions. And I think the anger and the listlessness and the loss of opportunity for a lot of people, from the financial crisis onward, and that sense of precarity, has completely contributed to the conditions for a theory like this to latch on. And Trump is certainly a big player in the extended QAnon universe.

So I don’t think that social media companies created this in any way, but what they are responsible for is helping all those people find each other. They’ve given them an infrastructure, and they’ve also given them a path to monetization and a path to fame. There is a lot of money to be made. I think the current conditions in the country and the world — the disillusionment — helped birth the theory and give it purpose. And then these companies help spread it and supercharge it and give people a lot of incentives to keep it going forward.

Twitter recently announced that it was banning thousands of QAnon accounts, and Facebook said it was planning to do something similar, though it’s Facebook so we should probably take their word with a grain of salt. Is that the kind of action you think tech companies should be taking?

Adding friction to this movement is certainly helpful, but I also think that the horse is out of the barn here. A very classic dynamic of these tech platforms is to roll something out or build some sort of system without really thinking about the consequences of what would happen if it was abused, have people abuse it, have things get really out of control, and only once they’ve gotten that far out of control, try to rein it back in. And to some degree, you really can’t get back to where you started.

That’s what makes it really frustrating that Facebook decided to take this seriously and do their first audit of QAnon content on their platform only this June. This stuff has been going on for almost three years! And now they’re trying to stamp out these communities, but I don’t know that you can. I think they’ll just move somewhere else. I think Facebook and Twitter and YouTube gave them the petri dish in which to grow and now they’re strong enough that they don’t need it anymore.

Some free-speech advocates — and I mean free speech in the loose, extralegal sense — are concerned about social media platforms moderating content because it further entrenches the power of a few corporations to dictate the ambit of acceptable discourse. Do you share those concerns, or do you think they’re overblown?

I think all the free-speech concerns are seriously complicated. These platforms don’t want to be seen as making editorial decisions, but there’s something very clarifying about QAnon. This isn’t some situation where reasonable people can disagree. This is a conspiracy theory that was born on a white supremacist anti-Semitic message board about the former Democratic presidential candidate being thrown in Guantánamo for crimes against the United States. This is a bonkers, extremely dangerous thing.

Do you want these companies making these decisions? No, because they’ve clearly shown that they’re not very good at it and they clearly don’t really want to be the solution. But unfortunately, these decisions have to be made by these people because they let it get this far.

And I just don’t know what the alternative is. Just see where this goes? I mean, OK, but can anyone see a future in which this evolves in any way that is constructive toward our politics or our society? This takes politics and it turns it into a sci-fi comic about child sex cabals.

Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor and cult expert, recently told the MIT Technology Review that a lot of the interest in QAnon is motivated by fear, and that treating it solely as a problem of misinformation or algorithmic design won’t be enough to check its influence. Is there any consensus about what would be enough?

I’ve yet to hear of anything. People who study cults fundamentally believe that this is not just a problem of misinformation. This is much more complicated than that. This is something that can’t really be solved with fact-checking. I spoke to Mike Rothschild, a researcher who’s writing a book on QAnon and has been following it for the past three years, and he said he gets people who come to him almost every day saying, “I have a family member who’s fallen into this, what do I say to pull him out of it?” And he says there is nothing you can really say right now to pull them out of it.

But don’t call them crazy. This has to be approached with a certain degree of empathy for people who’ve fallen down this rabbit hole. This is filling a meaningful role in their lives, whether it’s giving them purpose or making their world more legible, it’s doing something important. And they have to find a way to make this community less important, to make this belief have less primacy in their lives.

But I don’t think that there are easy solutions. Adrian Hon, an alternate reality game designer whom I interviewed, said that people don’t stop playing the game until it stops fulfilling a need. They’re not going to stop playing it because you tell them the game is stupid. You have to give them a reason to stop wanting to play the game. You don’t end things like QAnon without giving people valid reasons to turn away.

So where do you see QAnon going?

I think we’re just in the early stages. We’re at this moment right now where everyone is just trying to get a sense of where this fits on the threat radar, in our Homeland Security color-coded chart. There are a number of people who have been studying it for a while who think this is an orange or a red, that we’re in a really dark place.

A lot depends on where it actually intersects with modern politics and the election. You have a way in which, you know, you could have Lindsey Graham and others denounce this as a conspiracy theory that is dangerous and bad, or you can have Donald Trump decide it’s not all that politically helpful to him. Or you could have him decide that this is great! And that more winking and nodding to the QAnon supporters is helpful, and then more people try to follow Marjorie Taylor Greene’s template and it gets bigger and bigger, and then the press obsesses over it.

One thing that people who study this are worried about is that the press is going to talk about only the most palatable parts of it, not about Hillary Clinton cutting off the faces of babies and wearing them as skin masks because that’s not good to talk about, so they’ll just talk about it as a deep-state theory and it’ll get sanded down and that will actually make it more palatable to people.

I think if you’re reading this at home, it’s something to take really seriously. But where it heads and just how dark it gets is still, I think, a little bit up for grabs.

Please go here for the original: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/opinion/qanon-facebook-trump.html