Thread by @dappergander

So I wrote about 500 words on the current state of QAnon.

I also didn't really write it for Twitter, so pardon the occasional awkward formatting.
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tl;dr QAnon was quarantined off of mainstream social media with moderate success, but has relocated their community onto platforms already used by extremist groups. While QAnon’s ability to recruit has been curtailed, believers are now in danger of being recruited themselves.
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As you may or may not know, QAnon was finally and dramatically purged from Twitter and Facebook after the January 6th insurrection. This came many months too late—years, really—but it happened.
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And the purge was so sweeping that many of the big-names haven’t been able to come back and start over as they so often did before, because they heavily relied on one another to rebuild their followings (whoever wasn’t suspended would advertise the returning accounts).
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If you weren’t on Twitter that night, the suspensions came in large batches, rolled out over a few hours. When the breadth of the action became clear, the remaining influencers started quickly advertising their own alternative accounts on Gab and Parler.
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Many believers created accounts to follow their QAnon preachers to those platforms (Gab boasted of millions of new users).

But a large group of QAnon influencers, led by ET, had devised another plan: to bring QAnon to Telegram where no one could exert any control over them.
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As the last batches of Twitter suspensions rolled out, links were being shared not only to individual influencers’ Gab and Parler accounts, but to a Telegram channel where many of those same influencers would act collectively as moderators.
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This included ET, Jordan Sather, Qtah, M3l, CJTruth, Re5iGam, Tommy G, PepeDeluxe, Sun Q Tzu, and over a dozen others.

At first, this effort was moderately successful, but then Parler also went down, and Gab’s servers couldn’t handle the new traffic, becoming unstable.
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More and more believers went to Telegram, having nowhere else to go, and the QAnon channel grew quite large. These platforms are largely absent of dissenting voices, so the Anons that end up there face a constant reinforcement of their beliefs.
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In this way, QAnon is assured to go on.

However, the platforms onto which QAnon has been forced to retreat—the so-called “free speech” platforms—were already densely populated with other communities purged from social media in the past.
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Notably, supremacist groups, racist groups, militias, and neo-Nazis.

During the time QAnon was permitted to remain on Twitter, posing a danger to others, paradoxically, QAnon believers were also being protected from mass recruitment by even more dangerous groups.
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That protection has been removed. Whereas QAnon influencers had always tried to steer their followers away from visiting the chan boards, they are now purposely leading them into an environment even more toxic.
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As things stand now, QAnon’s ability to recruit has been severely damaged. But the ability of other groups to recruit disgruntled and angry Anons has been vastly expanded.
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QAnon followers on Telegram are now only a few clicks away from hardcore accelerationist group channels. More than ever before, believers are vulnerable to extremist groups who are practiced at taking discontent or unease and turning it into focused hate.
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QAnon was already a movement deeply infected by antisemitism, and their beliefs were already vulnerable to further radicalization. Now they have isolated themselves on Nazi Fantasy Island.
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Appendix: This is one of the reasons you’re going to see a lot more of my and others' screenshots with details blurred or obscured.

We do not want our screenshots to make it easier for believers to relocate to Telegram.
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I’m still learning some of these new rules myself, and what to obscure or not is largely a judgment call, so I’m bound to screw it up, but I’m trying to do what I can.

If you share screenshots, I would advise similar caution.
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