{"id":295469,"date":"2021-07-09T20:26:15","date_gmt":"2021-07-09T17:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/qanon-has-receded-from-social-media-but-its-just-hiding\/"},"modified":"2021-07-09T20:26:15","modified_gmt":"2021-07-09T17:26:15","slug":"qanon-has-receded-from-social-media-but-its-just-hiding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/qanon-has-receded-from-social-media-but-its-just-hiding\/","title":{"rendered":"#QAnon has receded from social media — but it\u2019s just hiding"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#QAnon has receded from social media<\/a> — but it\u2019s just hiding<\/strong>”
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On the face of it, you might think that the QAnon conspiracy has largely disapp<\/a>eared from big social media sites. But that\u2019s not quite the case.<\/p>\n

True, you\u2019re much less likely to find popular QAnon catchphrases like \u201cgreat awakening,\u201d \u201cthe storm\u201d or \u201ctrust the plan\u201d on Facebook these days. Facebook and Twitter have removed tens of thousands of accounts dedicated to the baseless conspiracy theory, which depicts former President Donald Trump as a hero fighting a secret battle against a sect of devil-worshipping pedophiles who dominate Hollywood, big business, the media and government.<\/p>\n

Gone are the huge \u201cStop the Steal\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But QAnon is far from winding down. Federal intelligence officials\u00a0recently warned<\/a>\u00a0that its adherents could commit more violence, like the deadly Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. At least one open supporter of QAnon has been\u00a0elected to Congress<\/a>. In the four years since someone calling themselves \u201cQ\u201d started posting enigmatic messages on fringe internet discussions boards, QAnon has grown up.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s DFRLab who focuses on domestic extremism. \u201cQ-specific stuff is sort of dwindling,\u201d he said. But the worldviews and conspiracy theories that QAnon absorbed are still with us.<\/p>\n

Loosely tying these movements together is a general<\/a> distrust of a powerful, often leftist elite. Among them are purveyors of anti-vaccine falsehoods, adherents of Trump\u2019s \u201cBig Lie\u201d that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and believers in just about any other worldview convinced that a shadowy cabal secretly controls things.<\/p>\n

For social platforms, dealing with this faceless, shifting and increasingly popular mindset is a far more complicated challenge than they\u2019ve dealt with in the past.<\/p>\n

These ideologies \u201chave cemented their place and now are a part of American folklore,\u201d said Max Rizzuto, another researcher at DFRLab. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll ever see it disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Online, such groups now blend into the background. Where Facebook groups once openly referenced QAnon, you\u2019ll now see others like \u201cSince you missed this in the so called MSM,\u201d a page referencing \u201cmainstream media\u201d that boasts more than 4,000 followers. It features links to clips of Fox News<\/a>\u2019 Tucker Carlson and to articles from right-wing publications such as Newsmax and the Daily Wire.<\/p>\n

Subjects range from allegedly rampant crime to unfounded claims of widespread election fraud and an \u201coutright war on conservatives.\u201d Such groups aim to draw followers in deeper by directing them to further information on less-regulated sites such as Gab or Parler.<\/p>\n

When DFRLab\u00a0analyzed more than 40 million<\/a>\u00a0appearances 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.<\/p>\n

So while your friends and relatives might not be posting wild conspiracies about Hillary Clinton drinking children\u2019s blood, they might instead be repeating debunked claims such as that vaccines can alter your DNA.<\/p>\n

There are several reasons for dwindling Q talk \u2014 Trump losing the presidential election, for instance and the lack of new messages from \u201cQ.\u201d But the single biggest factor appears to have been the QAnon crackdown on Facebook and Twitter. Despite well-documented\u00a0mistakes<\/a>\u00a0that revealed\u00a0spotty enforcement<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

While QAnon groups, pages and core accounts may be gone, many of their supporters remain on the big platforms \u2014 only now they\u2019re camouflaging their language and watering down the most extreme tenets of QAnon to make them more palatable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a very, very explicit effort within the QAnon community to to camouflage their language,\u201d said Angelo Carusone, the president and CEO of Media Matters, a liberal research group that has followed QAnon\u2019s rise. \u201cSo they stopped using a lot of the codes, the triggers, the keywords that were eliciting the kinds of enforcement actions against them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other dodges may have also helped. Rather than parroting Q slogans, for instance, for a while earlier this year supporters would type three asterisks next to their name to signal adherence to the conspiracy theory. (That\u2019s a nod to former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, a three-star general).<\/p>\n

Facebook says it has removed about 3,300 pages, 10,500 groups, 510 events, 18,300 Facebook profiles and 27,300 Instagram accounts for violating its policy against QAnon. \u201cWe continue to consult with experts and improve our enforcement in response to how harm evolves, including by recidivist groups,\u201d the company said in a statement.<\/p>\n

But the social giant will still cut individuals posting about QAnon slack, citing experts who warn that banning individual Q adherents \u201cmay lead to further social isolation and danger,\u201d the company said. Facebook\u2019s policies and response to QAnon continue to evolve. Since last August, the company says it has added dozens of new terms as the movement and its language has evolved.<\/p>\n

Twitter, meanwhile, says it has consistently taken action against activity that could lead to offline harm. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, the company began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that it said were \u201cprimarily dedicated\u201d to sharing dangerous QAnon material. Twitter said it has suspended 150,000 such accounts to date. Like Facebook, the company says its response is also evolving.<\/p>\n

But the crackdown may have come too late. Carusone, for instance, noted that Facebook\u00a0banned QAnon groups tied to violence<\/a>\u00a0six weeks before it\u00a0banned QAnon more broadly<\/a>. That effectively gave followers notice to regroup, camouflage and move to different platforms.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there were ever a time for a social media company to take a stand on QAnon content, it would have been like months ago, years ago,\u201d DFRLabs\u2019 Rizzuto said.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#QAnon has receded from social media — but it\u2019s just hiding” On the face of it, you might think that the QAnon conspiracy has largely disappeared from big social media sites. But that\u2019s not quite the case. True, you\u2019re much less likely to find popular QAnon catchphrases like \u201cgreat awakening,\u201d \u201cthe storm\u201d or \u201ctrust the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":295470,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/07\/AP21190152137872-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[111504,17135,4941,4974,74626,4976,10401],"class_list":["post-295469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-7-9-21","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-donald-trump","tag-facebook","tag-qanon","tag-social-media","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}