Tag: conspiracy theorists

QAnon: What is it and where did it come from?

President Trump has spoken of how supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has grown online in the US, appear to like him very much.

Mr Trump told journalists that he didn’t know much about the movement, but added that he’d heard that “these were people who love our country.”

The movement is facing a crackdown from Facebook as well as Twitter, who have taken action against thousands of accounts and web addresses linking to videos and websites spreading QAnon’s bizarre ideas.

So what is QAnon and who believes in it? Continue reading.

Disinformation moves from fringe sites to Facebook, YouTube

Report: Extremists promoting conspiracies are using same tactics as foreign actors

Lawmakers and regulators focusing their attention on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for the platforms’ role in propagating disinformation may be missing a big chunk of other online sites and portals that drive conspiracies and outright falsehoods, according to a nonprofit group that is studying how disinformation works.

Sites and discussion portals such as 4chan, 8chan, Reddit and Gab, as well as smaller social media sites such as Pinterest and even payment sites such as PayPal and GoFundMe, and online retailers such as Amazon and others are all part of a large online ecosystem that helps domestic and foreign agents shape disinformation and launch adversarial campaigns, the Global Disinformation Index said in a reportreleased last week.

The group is funded by USAID, the United Kingdom, and philanthropic entities.

View the complete August 8 article by Gopal Ratnam on The Roll Call website here.

‘We are Q’: A deranged conspiracy cult leaps from the Internet to the crowd at Trump’s ‘MAGA’ tour

The following article by Isaac Stanley-Becker was posted on the Washington Post website August 1, 2018:

During President Trump’s rally on July 31, several attendees held or wore signs with the letter “Q.” Here’s what the QAnon conspiracy theory is about. Credit: Amber Ferguson, The Washington Post

On Tuesday evening, the dark recesses of the Internet lit up with talk of politics.

“Tampa rally, live coverage,” wrote “Dan,” posting a link to President Trump’s Tampa speech in a thread on 8chan, an anonymous image board also known as Infinitechan or Infinitychan, which might be best described as the unglued twin of better-known 4chan, a message board already untethered from reality.

The thread invited “requests to Q,” an anonymous user claiming to be a government agent with top security clearance, waging war against the so-called deep state in service to the 45th president. “Q” feeds disciples, or “bakers,” scraps of intelligence, or “bread crumbs,” that they scramble to bake into an understanding of the “storm” — the community’s term, drawn from Trump’s cryptic reference last year to “the calm before the storm” — for the president’s final conquest over elites, globalists and deep-state saboteurs.

View the complete post here.