When DFRLab analyzed more than 40 million appearances 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.
So while your friends and relatives might not be posting wild conspiracies about Hillary Clinton drinking children’s blood, they might instead be repeating debunked claims such as that vaccines can alter your DNA.
There are several reasons for dwindling Q talk — Trump losing the presidential election, for instance. But the single biggest factor appears to have been the QAnon crackdown on Facebook and Twitter. Despite well-documented mistakes that revealed spotty enforcement, 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.
But while QAnon groups, pages and core accounts may be gone, many of their supporters remain on the big platforms — only now they’re camouflaging their language and watering down the most extreme tenets of QAnon to make them more palatable.
“There was a very, very explicit effort within the QAnon community to to camouflage their language,” said Angelo Carusone, the president and CEO of Media Matters, a liberal research group that has followed QAnon’s rise. “So they stopped using a lot of the codes, the triggers, the keywords that were eliciting the kinds of enforcement actions against them.”
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’s a nod to former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, a three-star general).
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. “We continue to consult with experts and improve our enforcement in response to how harm evolves, including by recidivist groups,” the company said in a statement.
Stats on suppression of free speech here. Comical article.
After peaks in the late summer of 2020 and briefly on Jan. 6, QAnon catchphrases have largely evaporated from mainstream sites, DFRLab found.
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Did anyone happen to mention that part of the decline may have been because Q’s last post was on December 8, with only 4 posts made after the election?