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Ben Collins Profile picture
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4 Jan, 5 tweets, 3 min read
New from me + @BrandyZadrozny + @janestreet:

Trump pushed QAnon and 4chan-created conspiracy theories in Georgia call

nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…
Let's decode all of the conspiracy theories in Trump's now-infamous Georgia phone call, and show how they traveled from the QAnon network faction on Twitter and 4chan all the way to the president's mouth.

nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…
Trump's first conspiracy? A "known scammer" in Atlanta personally rigged the election.

This rumor started on 4chan, then trended on Twitter due to QAnon accounts.

In reality, the poll worker runs a mall kiosk that sells purses. The president is lying.
nbcnews.com/tech/internet/… Image
In the call, President Trump mentions a hashtag that had basically no footing outside of QAnon accounts. We're talking hundreds of retweets.

“You know what was trending on the Internet?

The hashtag targeted an election worker. It's odd he'd heard of it.

nbcnews.com/tech/internet/… Image
The Dominion conspiracy theory is raw QAnon.

It started on 4chan/8kun. The voting machine "expert" that the president kept retweeting runs 8kun, and may be Q himself.

QAnon accounts made it go viral.

Then the president mentioned it on the phone call.

nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…

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Ben Collins Profile picture
5 Jan
MyPillow guy just linking directly to 8kun at 3:40 in the morning.
Almost all of these election conspiracy theories are from TheDonaldDotWin, 4chan or 8kun.

They’re screenshotted or plagiarized on Twitter and Facebook, but the internet’s worst people are inventing this stuff anonymously, then Q influencers are catapulting it to the president.
QAnon influencers have systematically subsumed the pro-Trump information economy in the last seven weeks.

People like Lin Wood and the MyPillow guy who aggregate fan fiction from 8kun get picked up by The Gateway Pundit. Hours later it’s a “people are saying” segment on OANN.
Read 4 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
29 Dec 20
Once you open up social networks to liability for user speech, they will all look like the homepage for Disney.com.

A Section 230 repeal is an insane thing for Trump to want. It'd leave an immediate regulatory black hole. Nobody who wants this gone understands it.
In the extraordinarily unlikely world where Section 230 gets repealed, the most likely next step would be mass deletion of Q and anti-vaxx accounts due to legal liability, the very same people who are begging for it to be repealed because they don’t know what it is.
Repeal of Section 230 would, ironically, be a doomsday scenario for QAnon accounts and anybody who prints salacious lies on social media.

It could also have a profound chilling effect for legit protest movements. It’d provide incongruous speech levers to the rich and powerful.
Read 4 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
22 Dec 20
New from me:

As Trump meets with QAnon influencers, the conspiracy theory's adherents beg for dictatorship
nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…
The pro-Trump internet has been calling for Trump to "#crosstherubicon," a reference to Caesar kickstarting a dictatorship.

This was a direct push from Ron Watkins, who runs the QAnon hub where Q posts, last week. Now it's being pushed by the Arizona GOP.
nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…
It's hard to express how divorced from reality the pro-Trump internet has become.

Some followers believe Trump is conducting a ground war in MAINE, and that he dropped a bomb killing 50k uniformed Chinese soldiers. Tens of thousands of YouTube views.
nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…
Read 7 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
9 Dec 20
It's better to view Q as a network or community that moves in unison without objection.

They've moved on from the Satanic child eating, and from Q himself, as the president tries to overturn the election.

Now, they look to 8kun's Ron Watkins, and they're targeting democracy.
This community existed before Q, but it was a series of disparate political movements without a centralized messaging strategy. Some anti-vaxxers, some NWO/InfoWars people, some Tea Party people.

It is now a formalized network graph used for targeted messaging and harassment.
The irony that this "American patriot movement" is run by a guy in Japan operating a site otherwise used by diaper fetishists is, in fact, lost on a lot of these people.

People are still hanging on Q's every word, and look to Q influencers for guidance in his absence.
Read 4 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
8 Dec 20
New Zealand's government found that the white supremacist Christchurch mass shooter was "not a frequent commentator on extreme right-wing sites."

Instead, it was the YouTube radicalization pathway, "a significant source of information and inspiration."
theguardian.com/world/live/202…
What was incredible, covering YouTube-abetted terror at the time, was the lies, the obfuscation, the impossibility of getting answers from YouTube.

Astronomical harm that I saw with my own eyes, and I was viewed as crazy and melodramatic for reporting on it.

Until Christchurch.
The next few months became watching a car wreck in slow motion. All of these kids radicalized by YouTube, then sent off to 8chan or 4chan or one of the more niche, dumber forums, begging each other to kill for the cause.

By the summer, I'd wake up on weekends and expect them.
Read 4 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
1 Dec 20
The guy who ran 8chan, who spent the last several years in the Philippines, is driving a harassment campaign against a random IT professional in an effort to further the Dominion conspiracy theory.

He's doing it on this website, using the army of QAnon fans he's built for years.
This is not just a particularly amoral way to boost a dying conspiracy theory. And it's not just a terrible thing for democracy.

It's also just a rotten thing to do to a random fellow human, who woke up today the target of horrific threats just for doing his job.
I got started on this beat because an old college buddy of mine became a target of one of these conspiracy theories in the weeks after the worst days of his life.

His girlfriend was killed on live TV. YouTube and Google told the world it was staged.
thedailybeast.com/what-do-you-sa…
Read 6 tweets

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