What happened to QAnon?

Despite Trump's defeat, the largest conspiracy movement in the United States is alive and well and is reorganizing itself with new goals and new forms of mobilization

(Photo by Stephanie Keith / Getty Images) Nearly six months old away, the attack on the Capitol by supporters of the former US president, Donald Trump, now seems like a bad memory. Especially for the Republicans, who last week promptly blocked the formation of an independent commission of inquiry into the events of January 6 to protect the image of the party. However, despite the arrests and stances of mainstream social networks, conspiracy movements continue to gather support and participate in US public life: one above all, QAnon.

According to the latest Public Religion Research poll institute and the interfaith youth core (PRRI), currently some 30 million Americans think Q's theories are partly if not fully founded. Carried out in March, the survey measures the respondents' adhesion rate to three principles of the movement: 15% argue that politics, the media and the financial system in the country are controlled by a group of pedophile Satanists, while 20% say that "A storm" will soon come to overthrow the ruling elites. Finally, another 15% believe that "true American patriots" may have to use violence to "save the nation". "If QAnon were a religion, it would now have the same faithful as the Protestant community among white Americans," said Robby Jones, founder of the PRRI in an interview with the New York Times.

Organization on Telegram

A religion without prophets, as QAnon hasn't given any news since January and Trump has become the social media pariah, forever blocked from Twitter and Snapchat and suspended from indefinite time from Facebook and Instagram. A lack that has begun to be felt, especially for a movement that has always enjoyed the more or less hidden sympathy of the former president, who on several occasions has preferred not to distance himself from QAnon justifying himself behind the alleged fight against pedophilia carried out by his followers , in addition to their declared love for their homeland. A host of new characters promptly responded to this power vacuum, who in a very short time became real QAnon influencers on one of the new favorite platforms of the movement: Telegram.

“There is nothing and no one to stand in your way on Telegram, as happens on other large platforms. No moderation, no counter-narrative or alternative voice, "says Marc-André Argentino, a researcher at Concordia University specializing in far-right movements, to explain the sudden love story between Telegram and QAnon. At the top of the ranking of the most followed personalities, Lin Wood, a conspiracy lawyer and very loyal of Trump with a channel of 830 thousand followers and GhostEzra, an anonymous profile that has about 330 thousand followers and which has recently taken a strongly anti-Semitic turn. At the bottom of the podium, "We are the media", the channel created by a group of other well-known QAnon influencers, with around 200,000 subscribers.

Change of direction

Trump's defeat does not it would therefore have decimated the movement, indeed: it would have only redefined its priorities and direction, without damaging its diffusion. "They have been able to adapt to the changes in the public debate, which has set aside Trump to focus on accelerating the vaccination campaign", explains Devin Burghart, director of the Institute for research and education on human rights in Seattle, about supporters of the theory.

In recent months, many QAnon followers have gone from wanting to stop the "steal" ("Stop the steal", referring to President Joe Biden's alleged stolen victory in the elections) to wanting to stop the steal. vaccination campaign, organizing demonstrations and conferences against the use of masks and social distancing. On the web, the best weapon of the movement remains the Vaccine adverse event reporting system, the site where the government records the relationship between the number of deaths and doses administered to the population: statistics that would be intended for members of the scientific community which are instead used to disseminate misinformation and skepticism. Starting with the lexicon: for the members of the movement, "vaccine" has become synonymous with "potion" or "biological weapon".

And while experts wonder what the next target of conspiracy theorists will be once vaccines have given their results on the population, QAnon continues to make its way into the political life of the country, starting from the bottom. “I wonder when we will be able to really understand what just happened in front of our eyes and move locally,” wrote a user on the QAnon bulletin board in January. Another urged the members of the movement not to limit themselves to simply presiding over school and municipal councils but to "make their way within the local authorities". According to a Time investigation, it would be impossible to pinpoint the number of QAnon followers who answered the call, with a few glaring exceptions.

One of them is Katie Williams, elected as a member of Clark's school board County, a county in Nevada where more than 300,000 children live. #Qatie, as she is nicknamed by detractors, does not hide her political positions on social media, even going so far as to directly attack important members of the Democratic Party. “She wants to be the next Marjorie Taylor Greene,” explains one of the mothers in the county, referring to the QAnon supporter who was elected to Congress last November. And a school board could be the right springboard.

By shifting its focus to new goals, the movement has managed to overcome the blatant groundlessness of its prophecies. QAnon has therefore entered a different phase of his path, but no less insidious: a phase in which the failure to fulfill the prophecies is an increasingly marginal detail compared to faith in Q (or in whoever takes his place).




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Topics

Conspiracy Donald Trump Fake news Social media Social Network United States globalData.fldTopic = "Conspiracy, Donald Trump, Fake news, Social media, Social Networks, United States "

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