QAnon Believers Will Likely Outlast and Outsmart Twitter’s Ban

It also says online conversations help determine the targets of harassment and violence for the small subset of individuals whose beliefs translate into real-world action.

One such example came from the Pizzagate conspiracy (seen by some as a precursor to QAnon), which motivated an American man to gun down a pizza shop that was supposedly a front for a child sex trafficking ring.

QAnon Likely to Stay
While it’s hard to say exactly how many QAnon believers there are, the movement has thousands of followers on social media.

A recent investigation of QAnon-related pages and groups on Facebook found there are about three million followers and members in total. But there is likely significant overlap among these accounts.

According to a New York Times report citing anonymous sources, Facebook is planning to enforce similar measures to limit the reach of QAnon content on its platform. One of the largest Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon currently has more than 200,000 members.

Given QAnon’s reach, it will be difficult for Twitter to stamp it out altogether.

Social media bans are hard to maintain. Content can be shared under new accounts. New code words and hashtags can be adopted which artificial intelligence algorithms can’t detect.

For example, many QAnon believers have tried to operate unnoticed on Twitter by using the number 17 to reference “Q” (the 17th letter of the alphabet), or by writing “CueAnon” instead of “QAnon”.

Human moderators may be needed to identify such circumvention attempts. And it’s hard to say how much human resource Twitter is willing or able to devote to moderating this content.

Banned users can also enlist virtual private networks (VPNs) to change their IP addresses and bypass restrictions.

Furthermore, conspiracy theories such as QAnon are difficult to counter as they are “self-sealing”: any action against believers is interpreted as “evidence” of the theory’s validity.

This is because conspiracists often think agents of the conspiracy have unusual and extensive powers. Some QAnon believers are taking Twitter’s bans to be confirmation of a “deep state” plot against Trump.

That said, it’s possible Twitter’s measures will reduce QAnon’s visibility. A similar past crackdown by Reddit was effective in stemming QAnon activity. Before its ban in 2018, the largest QAnon subreddit had more than 70,000 members.

However, many of these users simply moved to other sites such as YouTube and Facebook – a common trend following bans.

With QAnon followers expanding and folding new events into their narrative, the fringe movement has taken on a life of its own.

Numerous Republican candidates for congress have promoted it. Trump himself has repeatedly retweeted QAnon accounts.

If Twitter is serious about its newest tussle with misinformation, it will likely have to pull out all the stops.

Audrey Courty is Ph.D. candidate, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.