QAnon Has Receded From Social Media But Is Ready To Strike Again: AP

On the face of it, you might think that the QAnon conspiracy has largely disappeared from big social media sites. But that’s not quite the case, Barbara Ortutay reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Gone are the huge “Stop the Steal” groups that spread falsehoods about the 2020 US presidential elections. Trump is gone as well, banned from Twitter permanently and suspended from posting on Facebook until 2023.

But QAnon is far from winding down. Federal intelligence officials recently warned that its adherents could commit more violence, like the deadly Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. At least one open supporter of QAnon has been elected to Congress.

In the four years since someone calling themselves “Q” started posting enigmatic messages on fringe internet discussions boards, QAnon has grown up. That’s partly because QAnon now encompasses a variety of conspiracy theories, from evangelical or religious angles to alleged pedophilia in Hollywood and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, said Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab who focuses on domestic extremism. “Q-specific stuff is sort of dwindling,” he said. But the worldviews and conspiracy theories that QAnon absorbed are still with us.

When DFRLab analyzed more than 40 million appearances of QAnon catchphrases and related terms on social media this spring, it found that their presence on mainstream platforms had declined significantly in recent months. After peaks in the late summer of 2020 and briefly on Jan. 6, QAnon catchphrases have largely evaporated from mainstream sites, DFRLab found.

So while your friends and relatives might not be posting wild conspiracies about Hillary Clinton drinking children’s blood, they might instead be repeating debunked claims such as that vaccines can alter your DNA.

There are several reasons for dwindling Q talk — Trump losing the presidential election, for instance. But the single biggest factor appears to have been the QAnon crackdown on Facebook and Twitter.

Despite well-documented mistakes that revealed spotty enforcement, the banishment largely appears to have worked. It is more difficult to come across blatant QAnon accounts on mainstream social media sites these days, at least from the publicly available data that does not include, for instance, hidden Facebook groups and private messages.

But while QAnon groups, pages and core accounts may be gone, many of their supporters remain on the big platforms — only now they’re camouflaging their language and watering down the most extreme tenets of QAnon to make them more palatable.

“There was a very, very explicit effort within the QAnon community to camouflage their language,” said Angelo Carusone, the president and CEO of Media Matters, a liberal research group that has followed QAnon’s rise. “So they stopped using a lot of the codes, the triggers, the keywords that were eliciting the kinds of enforcement actions against them.”

WEEKLY FEATURE : PAL READY TO SOAR WITH PANDEMIC