QAnon Research: March 11, 2022
Conference guests include a former president and maybe some cryptids...check it out!
Schooling, Urban Legends, and Masculinity
Welcome back! When we first launched this newsletter, the extremism and disinformation community was turning its eyes towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the trucker convoys spreading across North America, and the upcoming legislation targeting children’s education. While this is a newsletter focused on QAnon, we recognize that there are connections between these events and ideologies that cannot easily be distinguished. This is reflective of this month’s newsletter, which only has a smattering of QAnon-specific information but plenty of resources across the spectrum of extremism, conspiracy, and political polarization.
Some of the information posted here would be nearly impossible to find without the contributions of our submitters, so we please ask that you submit to our Google form to keep everyone in the loop. We also encourage people to comment on posts on the website and to always feel free to reach out to us. To grow the community, please invite anyone who might be interested by sending out a link to this newsletter:
We hope you find something useful and relevant in this month’s newsletter, and we look forward to your submissions. Take care!
Calls for Papers
International Society for Contemporary Legend Research 39th Annual Conference
The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research is taking submissions for its 39th annual conference in Ottawa this July.
Manuscript submissions are due ASAP.
Conference dates are July 11th - 15th, 2022.
As per our submission portal, “Proposals for papers on all aspects of contemporary, urban, or modern legend research are sought, as are those on any legend-like tradition (rumour, conspiracy theories, fake news, etc.)—both historical and in the current day.” Find submission instructions here.
Journal of School Psychology Special Issue
The Journal of School Psychology is taking submissions for its special issue on “Causes and Consequences of Emerging Violent Extremism in the U.S. and Implications for School Safety, Student Mental Health, Families, and Communities”
Manuscript submissions are due September 9th, 2022.
As per their website, “While strongly grounded in prevention science, the special issue leverages a transdisciplinary approach to addressing a series of research questions on emerging violent extremism in the U.S., bridging and extending on existing knowledge to better understand how these trends may affect school safety, school climate, student mental health, and related forms of impact on families and their communities.”
Events
Conference: Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy [Link]
When: April 6th-8th, 2022
Registration Deadline: March 20th, 2022
Where: In-person (Chicago, IL) / Online
The University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and The Atlantic have partnered to host a conference on disinformation. From their news announcement, some conference events include:
A conversation with President Barack Obama, moderated by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic
What Happens When We Can’t Tell What’s Real Featuring: Joan Donovan, Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy
A conversation with Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa, moderated by Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic
How Powerful Are Algorithms, Really? Featuring: Rumman Chowdhury, Director of META (Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) at Twitter
Defending Free Speech in the Mobile Internet Age Featuring: Mary McCord, Georgetown Law, and Geoffrey Stone, Professor of Law at The University of Chicago
Imagining a Better Social Media Featuring: Ethan Zuckerman, Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Targeted by Lies: How Disinformation Spurs Political Violence Featuring: Christopher Krebs, Partner, Krebs Stamos Group; Former Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
Webinar: Conversions & Convergence: Side-switching Extremists and the Threat of Reciprocal Radicalisation [Link]
When: March 16th, 2022, 11am ET / 10am CT / 8am PT
As per the website, “ISD Germany and the German Institute on Radicalisation and De-Radicalisation Studies (GIRDS) are hosting the event, exploring questions around extremism and deradicalisation, including:
How can we better understand the dynamics between different forms of extremism?
What can we learn about deradicalisation from side-switching extremists?
How do we break cycles of reciprocal radicalisation?
Speakers include…Daniel Koehler, co-founder and director of German Institute on Radicalisation and De-Radicalisation Studies (GIRDS) and author of From Traitor to Zealot: Exploring the Phenomenon of Side-Switching in Extremism and Terrorism and Moustafa Ayad, ISD’s Executive Director for AMEA, whose recent work includes ISD report Islamogram: Salafism and Alt-Right Online Subcultures.
The event will be moderated by Julia Ebner, ISD Senior Research Fellow and author of The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism and Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists.”
Webinar: The Gamification of Extremism: Extremist Use of Gaming Platforms [Link]
When: March 24, 2022, 1pm ET / 12pm CT / 10am PT
As per the website, Tech Against Terrorism and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism “take an in-depth look into the use of gaming platforms by terrorist and violent extremist actors. Gaming platforms are designed for users to communicate, livestream, and support other logistics around online gaming. These platforms also tend to have a lower average user age than other types of tech platforms, presenting a unique content moderation challenge. The unique Trust & Safety challenges of gaming platforms thus require a tailored counterterrorism and countering violent extremism response due to their multi-purpose nature and high levels of daily content. In this webinar we will examine with an expert panel how gaming platforms are used by terrorist and violent extremist actors to communicate and operate online, as well as to livestream content and spread propaganda videos. We will also discuss the challenges to effectively moderating gaming platforms and working solutions to addressing this threat whilst safeguarding human rights and freedom of expression.”
Research Resources & Trainings
Webinar: Investigating Conspiracy Theorists in Europe [Link]
Bellingcat is a terrific organization with a long history of reporting on disinformation, extremism, and global crises. You can learn more about them and find some of their resources on their website.
As per their website, “Bellingcat, together with European investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports, is offering a limited number of free webinar places at workshops that will explore how to investigate the online platforms used by conspiracy groups in Europe.”
Deadline to Apply: March 23, 2022
Dataset: “The MeLa BitChute Dataset”
Milo Trujillo, Maurício Gruppi, Cody Buntain, and Benjamin D. Horne
As per the arVix preprint, “In this paper we present a near-complete dataset of over 3M videos from 61K channels over 2.5 years (June 2019 to December 2021) from the social video hosting platform BitChute, a commonly used alternative to YouTube. Additionally, we include a variety of video-level metadata, including comments, channel descriptions, and views for each video. The MeLa-BitChute dataset can be found at: this https URL.”
Publications
“The Nexus of QAnon and COVID-19: Legitimation Crisis and Epistemic Crisis” in Critical Sociology [Link]
Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita
Abstract: In this article, we analyze the role of conspiracy theories, especially the spread of QAnon during the COVID-19 pandemics, in the legitimation crisis and epistemic crisis in contemporary democracies. We discuss Habermas’ theory of legitimation crisis and the potential for reactionary movements in times of such crisis, as well as Hofstadter’s description of the paranoid style in political culture. We explain the notion of ‘epistemic crisis’ as theorized by Larry Laudan and discussed recently in relation to social media. We discuss anti-intellectualism in Hofstadter’s terms, and explain its connection with populism. Finally, we explain how all of this comes to bear on the contemporary proliferation of conspiracy theory, using QAnon and the COVID crisis as our point of reference, and examples from the United States and Brazil to illustrate our points. QAnon fueled COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and COVID-19 conspiracy theories rocketed QAnon to a place of major influence.
“A Viral Marketing-Based Model For Opinion Dynamics in Online Social Networks” preprint on arVix [Link]
Sijing Tu and Stefan Neumann
Abstract: Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the interplay between these two aspects: opinion formation and information cascades in online social networks. We present a new model that allows us to quantify how users change their opinion as they are exposed to viral content. Our model is a combination of the popular Friedkin-Johnsen model for opinion dynamics and the independent cascade model for information propagation. We present algorithms for simulating our model, and we provide approximation algorithms for optimizing certain network indices, such as the sum of user opinions or the disagreement-controversy index; our approach can be used to obtain insights into how much viral content can increase these indices in online social networks. Finally, we evaluate our model on real-world datasets. We show experimentally that marketing campaigns and polarizing contents have vastly different effects on the network: while the former have only limited effect on the polarization in the network, the latter can increase the polarization up to 59% even when only 0.5% of the users start sharing a polarizing content. We believe that this finding sheds some light into the growing segregation in today's online media.
“Setting a Q-uestionable attribute agenda: QAnon, far-right congressional candidates and irrational domains” in The Agenda Setting Journal [Link]
Marcus Funk and Burton Speakman
Abstract: The QAnon conspiracy blends ancient and malleable anti-Semitic bigotry with modern social media. Attribute intermedia agenda setting has rarely considered conspiracy theories. Conspiracies like QAnon are not fact-based and challenge conventional agenda setting methodologies. This study explores attribute IAS among national, regional, and local media coverage of QAnon-supporting congressional candidates in Georgia and Colorado in 2020. It introduces notions of rational and irrational agenda setting domains to fully analyze the transfer of irrational attributes across diverse media agendas.
Job Opportunities
Institute for Research on Male Supremacism
The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism is accepting rolling applications for a Program and Administrative Contractor.
As per the job posting, “The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism is seeking a remote part-time contractor to support our operations researching and challenging male supremacism. The 40-hour per month, 5-month position (with the possibility for an extension) will support a variety of tasks around administration, finance, fundraising, communications, and program development. We are looking for someone who has prior experience in at least some of these areas and who is a capable and eager learner, able to absorb new information and develop skills in this position. In other words, we welcome applications from candidates who might not have all the suggested qualifications looking for a growth experience, especially candidates from historically and systematically marginalized groups. The Program and Administrative Contractor will primarily report to the Executive Director, and will also work with the Board Treasurer and Chair. Thanks to grant support, the role is currently funded at $1200 per month for five months, with the option to extend if our fundraising permits. The position title and scope of responsibilities is negotiable based on the candidate’s experience.”