QAnon Research: April 18, 2022

An afternoon newsletter chock-full of great publications, perfect for a cozy reading nook and a cup of tea.

#Savethechildren, Online Communities, and the Future of QAnon

Welcome back! We’re keeping this month’s newsletter rather short, but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in content. We have several great recent publications in this month’s edition, with two pieces on #savethechildren, a report from Google’s Jigsaw team, and some work on the strategies, communities, and future of QAnon. We hope that you find something enlightening, interesting, or worth arguing about (preferably all three). 

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We hope you enjoy this month’s featured publications, and we look forward to your submissions. Take care!

Publications

“#SAVETHECHILDREN: How a Fringe Conspiracy Theory Fueled a Massive Child Abuse Panic” in The Media Manipulation Casebook [Link]

Kaylee Fagan (kayleefagan@hks.harvard.edu) 

Research Fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project within Harvard's Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics & Public Policy

Overview: A conspiratorial protest movement known as #SaveTheChildren swept across the United States, Canada, the UK, and Europe in the summer and early autumn of 2020, inspiring hundreds of in-person marches and demonstrations. The stated goal of the #SaveTheChildren campaign was to raise awareness around the horrors of “child sex trafficking,” a commonly misrepresented (although very real) problem in the United States and globally. However, much media coverage of this new movement initially failed to recognize that #SaveTheChildren was inspired by outlandish and debunked claims popularized by the online QAnon conspiracy movement; chiefly, the false notion that a “cabal” of politicians and celebrities participate in the satanic, ritual sexual abuse of children worldwide. By using social media to amplify misleading statistics and other misinformation, the #SaveTheChildren conspiracy movement contributed to an explosion of fear and anger surrounding child sex trafficking in the United States, and the proliferation of radical, conspiratorial beliefs that had previously been relegated to a relatively small, online community of conspiracy theorists.

The Current: Conspiracy Theories by Jigsaw [Link]

Overview: The spread of conspiracy theories online has contributed to a range of problems offline. For believers, these theories have rationalized the flouting of public health guidance, rationalized acts of violence, and the subversion of democratic norms. The first step to contain the potential harms of conspiracy theories is to understand not the theory, but the theorist.

Through interviews with 85 current and former conspiracy theorists, the latest issue of the Current from Google's Jigsaw team explores what draws people to conspiracy theories, how some believers ultimately make their way back, and the methods currently being researched and deployed to stem the spread of harmful conspiracy theories online.

About the Author: Jigsaw is a unit within Google that explores threats to open societies and builds technology that inspires scalable solutions.

“Paved with Bad Intentions: QAnon’s Save the Children Campaign” in The Journal of Online Trust and Safety [Link]

Cody Buntain (cbuntain@umd.edu), Mila Johns, Monique Deal Barlow, and Mia Bloom

Overview: In a recent article [...] we assess racial, gender, and age-related biases in QAnon-related images appearing alongside the #SaveTheChildren campaign. These images present a substantially warped racial view of child trafficking in the US and abroad, focusing heavily on white children. We connect this biased view with three factors that potentially helped drive the appropriation and spread of QAnon-related #SaveTheChildren content, particularly around visual depictions of graphic and racialized material. The dataset of images we assessed is available by request.

“Constructing Alternative Facts: Populist Expertise and the QAnon Conspiracy” in New Media and Society [Link]

Alice Marwick and William Clyde Partin

Abstract: Communication research is increasingly concerned with the relationship between epistemological fragmentation and polarization. Even so, explanations for why partisans take up fringe beliefs are limited. This paper examples the right-wing conspiracy QAnon, which posits that the anonymous poster “Q” is a Trump administration insider who encourages followers (“Bakers”) to research hidden truths behind current events. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork on the 8chan imageboard, we position baking as a collective, knowledge-making activity, built on the affordances of social media, designed to construct specific facts and theories that maintain QAnon’s cohesion over time. Bakers demonstrate populist expertise, the rejection of legacy media accounts of current events in favor of the “alternative facts” constructed through their systematic research program. We emphasize the politically ambivalent nature of participatory culture and argue that baking casts doubt on critical thinking or media literacy as solutions to “post-truth” dilemmas like hyper-partisan media and disinformation.

“Characterizing Reddit Participation of Users Who Engage in the QAnon Conspiracy Theories” in arXiv [Link]

Kristen Engel, Yiqing Hua, Taixiang Zeng, and Mor Naaman

Abstract: Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work characterizes how Reddit users who have participated in QAnon-focused subreddits engage in activities on the platform, especially outside their own communities. Using a large-scale Reddit moderation action against QAnon-related activities in 2018 as the source, we identified 13,000 users active in the early QAnon communities. We collected the 2.1 million submissions and 10.8 million comments posted by these users across all of Reddit from October 2016 to January 2021. The majority of these users were only active after the emergence of the QAnon Conspiracy theory and decreased in activity after Reddit's 2018 QAnon ban. A qualitative analysis of a sample of 915 subreddits where the "QAnon-enthusiastic" users were especially active shows that they participated in a diverse range of subreddits, often of unrelated topics to QAnon. However, most of the users' submissions were concentrated in subreddits that have sympathetic attitudes towards the conspiracy theory, characterized by discussions that were pro-Trump, or emphasized unconstricted behavior (often anti-establishment and anti-interventionist). Further study of a sample of 1,571 of these submissions indicates that most consist of links from low-quality sources, bringing potential harm to the broader Reddit community. These results point to the likelihood that the activities of early QAnon users on Reddit were dedicated and committed to the conspiracy, providing implications on both platform moderation design and future research.

“Sisterhood in 5D: Conspirituality and Instagram Aesthetics” in M/C Journal [Link]

Marie Heřmanová

Abstract: Online influencers play an increasingly important role in political communication – they serve as both intermediaries and producers of political messages. As established opinion leaders in areas such fashion and lifestyle consumption, many influencers recently turned towards more political content (Riedl et al.). For influencers who built their personal brands around aspirational domestic and lifestyle content, the COVID-19 global pandemic created an opportunity (and sometimes even a necessity) to engage in political discourse. The most basic everyday acts and decisions – such as where to shop for food, how to organise playdates for children, if and where to go on holiday – suddenly turned into political discussions and the influencers found themselves either promoting or challenging anti-pandemic restrictions imposed by national governments as they were forced to actively defend their decisions on such matters to their followers [...] This article builds on recent scholarship that focuses on the intersection of lifestyle, spiritual, and wellness content on Instagram and the proliferation of political conspiracy narratives on the platform (Remski, Argentino). I use the example of a prominent Czech spiritual influencer Helena Houdová to illustrate the blending of spiritual, aspirational and conspiracy content among Instagram influencers and argue that the specific aesthetics of Instagram conspiracies needs to be understood in the context of gendered, predominantly female ‘third spaces’ (Wright) in the male-coded global digital space.

“QAnon: The Calm Before the Storm” in Society [Link]

Omi Hodwitz, Steff King, and Jordan Thompson 

Abstract: QAnon, a group of conspiracy theorists dedicated to the overthrow of the deep state and the facilitation of the rapture, has been growing in strength and prominence since its inception in 2017. Originally started as an anonymous post on a message board, the collective has increased in membership, geographic footprint, and ideological reach. QAnon initiates have also expanded their repertoire of tactics, evolving from online chatter to rallies and, finally, to violent attacks, leading law enforcement to opine that the group may incite incidents of domestic terrorism. Although this outcome is possible, predictions of this kind have less merit unless supported by systematic analysis of the evidence. This essay attempts to address this need by providing an empirically grounded prediction of the future of QAnon. Specifically, it summarizes the results of comparative case analyses, which consists of examining groups and collectives that are comparable to QAnon on key factors and applying their trajectories to QAnon. Case comparisons indicate that QAnon may continue to grow in membership size and regional presence. In addition, QAnon members may persist in their use of violence, leading to an increase in the number and severity of their attacks.

Events

Webinar: Tackling Online Health Disinformation to Address Health Equity Barriers [Link]

When: April 28th, 2022, 11am ET / 10am CT / 8am PT 

Registration: Online, limited seats

As per the website, “The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a movement of online health disinformation, leaving consumers and patients to wonder what online information is credible and can be trusted. Heightened levels of distrust worsened existing health equity barriers–especially in the hardest-hit communities. Public health officials now face new challenges connecting with communities to share understandable, evidence-based science and medical information.

Dr. Garth Graham leads a new team at Google/YouTube by collaborating with public health leaders to improve public education through video content.

Join Dr. Garth Graham and moderator Dr. Tiffany Avery, Chief Medical Officer, NantHealth, as they discuss tackling online health disinformation and what steps we need to take moving forward as a community to reduce barriers to health equity.”

Research Resources & Training

Resource: Twitter’s API Playground [Link]

For researchers using Twitter’s API to scrape data (less useful following the mainstream bans of QAnon but potentially useful for future projects!), there’s a new GUI for testing out the API’s functionality. And if you’re new to Twitter’s API for academic research or want to learn more about how it works, there’s a new paper out assessing its functionality here.