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The QAnon movement has been in the United States for months. In the last election he won more power than ever and became a serious ally of Trumpism.
The capital letter Q was the focus of the last US election, often seen on banners and T-shirts at Donald Trump demonstrations. Identify the QAnon collective, whose followers believe in a number of conspiracy theories.
How did it happen?
Its origin is some posts in October 2017 on 4chan, an Internet forum on anime culture. They warned of an alleged investigation into Hillary Clinton for pedophilia and corruption. They were signed with the letter Q, used by officials with access to high-level classified information.
The acronym QAnon is supplemented by the abbreviation for “anonymous”, Anon. Whoever signed up as Q claimed to have secret government documentation, but never showed evidence. He gave only clues, which his followers call “crumbs”. They call themselves “bakers”, because with these signs they give answers to the riddles.
See more: QAnon, America’s Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory?
The group, originally a minority, was transferring its requests for 4chan to majority networks – Redit, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook – until it gained a large presence this year, due to the pandemic and the election campaign.
Anon promulgated covid denial theories and supported Trump, though some drifted away as he went from coronavirus skeptic to vaccine confidence.
On top of the conspiracy
The idea that gives rise to QAnon is that there is a pedophile and corrupt elite rooted in major institutions, including Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, businessmen, artists, such as actor Tom Hanks and even Papa. Francis. .
The “anons” then added some other hypotheses of all kinds, including those referring to the “plandemic”: the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory in a plan for economic or genocidal purposes.
Few limits have been found by the “bakers” in their speculations, although the mysterious Q has marked two: he does not share the flat Earth or that John F. Kennedy is still alive. They have amalgamated the incipient conspiracies with the established ones, of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Now, when you talk about QAnon, you don’t just think of a conspiracy theory, but all at the same time, be it anti-vaccines, 5G or George Soros.
Scientific popularizer Abbie Richards places QAnon at the top of the inverted pyramid of conspiracies, along with plains and reptilians, among the furthest from reality.
Pizzagate and the precursor novel
Q’s first message appeared on October 28, 2017 and the first “crumbs” were picked up by a follower of Pizzagate, another conspiracy theory that emerged a year earlier that also linked Washington politicians to pedophilia and induced a fan to shoot a Pizzeria.
Pizzagate and QAnon agree that they were born out of confidences on 4chan, and both use secret codes, obsessed with child trafficking and pedophilia, attribute satanic intentions to a hated elite, and promise future punishments.
Research on QAnon did not reveal whether Q is a person or more. Nor did he push a growing snowball if there was premeditation or improvisation. Not even if its main engine was economic – the profits from its Internet traffic – or maybe it was a simple satire.
The possibility that it all started with a joke is based on the similarities to the novel “Q”, a successful book about conspiracies in medieval Europe published in 1999 by the writers’ collective Project Luther Blissett, who took the name of a football player Jamaican.
Some members of Luther Blissett, the Bolognese Wu Ming Foundation, affirmed this similarity to their novel “Q” in 2018 and encouraged the hypothesis that QAnon’s origin was a trolling of left-wing groups directed at the American far right. too gullible, a mockery that has grown and is already unattainable three years later.
Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, argues that QAnon is a near-exact copy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a Russian libel against Jews that served Nazism to justify the pogroms.
Connections with Trump
The “anons” are convinced that Trump’s support predates Q’s first message, as the president announced on October 5, 2017, three weeks earlier, that “a storm” was approaching.
Trump never gave explicit support, but he didn’t distance himself either. Last August, at a press conference, he stressed that the important thing is that these Americans “love their country” and “like it very much”.
QAnon supporters are relentless in seeking Trump’s implicit winks. For example, at a rally in Tampa, Florida, he mentioned the number 17 four times, when he had been to Washington “about 17 times” four times before he became president. And the Q is the seventeenth letter of the English alphabet.
In August 2018, he hosted a QAnon promoter, Lionel Lebron, at the White House and also retweeted QAnon-related content multiple times.
Other Republican politicians gave even more evident public support to QAnon, including 77 election candidates. Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to Congress for Georgia. From January the “anons” will have a representative in the Capitol.
See more: Trump: the president who takes advantage of conspiracy theories
From disinformation to violence
QAnon is not a regulated organization, but heterogeneous internet groups that share information or disinformation. That is why it is difficult to gauge how many hoaxes its members believe and which ones have the greatest social and political impact.
One measure of its reach is the reactions on Twitter; for example, a message that assumed the kidnapping of 39 children had more than half a million “likes” despite being denied.
In 2019, the FBI called QAnon a potential terrorist threat. Several violent incidents have been linked to his followers, including a patricide in Seattle, a murder in New York and arrests of gunmen who made threats, including that of a driver who blocked a dam in Nevada for hours.
“Disinformation kills, it’s super proven, immediately or in the long term,” Cristina Tardáguila, associate director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), told Efe in October.
The veto in social networks
Facebook has limited content on QAnon due to its resemblance to “a militarized social movement”. In August, it removed 790 groups, 100 pages and 1,500 ads and blocked 300 tags on Facebook and Instagram. The closed groups had about 200,000 members.
Twitter suspended more than 7,000 accounts in July and announced it would stop promoting its posts as popular topics.
YouTube has taken similar measures, promoting “conspiracy theories that are used to justify violence in the real world”.
Its global impact
QAnon’s impact as a catalyst for disinformation transcends the American esoteric realm and is felt around the world, especially in the UK, Australia, Canada and Germany, where it was linked to a more veteran denial movement, Reichsbürger.
Several closed Facebook groups were in Spanish and had titles from Latin American countries, with thousands of followers each.
QAnon also permeates the new tactics of some political formations in Europe. One example is the tendency to include pedophilia or pedophilia labels in party messages on social media when referring to rival leaders.
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