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.
The thing is, the guy on 8kun who made up the rumor in his basement starts to think he’s onto something. The MyPillow guy picked it up! Then Gateway Pundit! Then OANN!
But it’s all just basement fiction, reinforced by a propaganda feedback loop that rewards fantastical thinking.
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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.
In the extraordinarily unlikely world where Section 230 gets repealed, the most likely next step would be mass deletion of Q and anti-vaxx accounts due to legal liability, the very same people who are begging for it to be repealed because they don’t know what it is.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.
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/…
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.
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.