QAnon’s Growing Threat to the November Election and to Democratic Processes Worldwide

President Donald Trump has retweeted to his millions of followers dozens of the more outlandish postings by QAnon adherents, and yesterday (Wednesday) had this exchange on the subject with a reporter:

Reporter: QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that?

President Trump: Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We are actually. We are saving the world.

Russian state media organs such as RT and Sputnik have stepped up their coverage of postings by QAnon followers, and the St. Petersburg-based troll factory Internet Research Agency, which in 2016 orchestrated Russia’s effective social media campaign to help Donald Trump win the election, has been using its thousands of fake social media account further to disseminate QAnon-related postings.

Academics who study QAnon and the online conspiracy universe note that there were no signs Russia had a hand in the early days of the QAnon movement, but the growth of the movement’s following – mightily aided by Trump’s constant re-tweeting of the most unhinged QAnon theories to his 85 million Twitter followers – have persuaded Russia’s disinformation and propaganda specialists that spreading QAnon’s conspiracies further would help Russia achieve its goal of weakening America by sowing division and acrimony; deepening polarization; discrediting democracy; and undermining trust in the government; judiciary; courts; and the media.

The Kremlin believes that helping Trump get elected, and re-elected, aids this broader Russian strategy.

Al Jazeera reports that cybersecurity expert on disinformation Cindy Otis, a former CIA analyst, told Reuters news agency that RT, Sputnik and other Kremlin-backed media have been writing more about QAnon, using it to fit into their broader narrative of: “The US is falling apart, look how much division there is.”

After Twitter banned thousands of QAnon accounts last month, RT.com predicted the move would backfire by directing more attention to the cause, adding that “it gave QAnon followers the validation they craved”.

Last week, it ran a similar article after Facebook removed about a third of QAnon groups and restricted the other two thirds.

Graphika, a research group specializing in using AI to analyze online communities, has just released a report — Interpreting Social Qs: Implications of the Evolution of QAnon – which analyzes the growth of the movement and the threat posed by the QAnon movement to the U.S. elections in November, and to democratic processes worldwide.

Here the “Introduction” and “Conclusion” sections of the study:

Introduction
The past few months have seen a wealth of mainstream news reporting on the conspiratorial social media movement known as QAnon. Some of these news pieces have charted its growth in the Covid-19 era, documented the presence of its supporters on Twitter and Facebook and covered the recent actions taken by these platforms to restrict its influence.

Graphika has been analyzing the QAnon community on an ongoing basis for over two years, developing a set of network maps that allow for an understanding of how this movement has changed over time. This includes regular assessments of the movement’s potential to cause real-world harm as a result of its involvement in topics like Covid-19 and the worldwide protests that began after the murder of George Floyd. Frequently discussed in publications about QAnon is the FBI’s decision to designate the movement a domestic terrorism threat in August of last year - while Graphika understands the majority of QAnon content to be innocuous, there are a number of situations in which this potential harm has become realized.

When we first mapped the network of QAnon supporters in June 2018, it was the most dense conspiratorial network Graphika had ever studied. This means that accounts engaged in QAnon theories at the time had an astounding rate of mutual followership and represented an extremely tight-knit online community. The likelihood with a community this dense is that accounts are exposed to, and engage with, very similar content to each other. Despite its significant growth and undeniable ‘mainstreaming’ over the past two years, QAnon continues to be exactly such a community.

After closely observing the evolution of the movement, this briefing lays out three concerns regarding the threat posed by the QAnon movement to the US elections in November, and to democratic processes worldwide:

I. The autonomy and adaptability of the QAnon movement continues to be routinely underestimated.

II. Foreign actors, predominantly Russia, have shown some interest in targeting QAnon supporters: while there have not been significant attempts to leverage this community to date, this remains a concern.

III. This is not just happening in the US - the internationalization of this community has spawned a global anti-government conspiracy movement.

The QAnon movement supports a set of nebulous conspiracy theories that revolve around the belief that there is a ‘global elite cabal’ whose members are embedded in influential positions in government, media, finance and the arts. In the US context, QAnon supporters usually also believe that this is a cabal of pedophiles who are orchestrating child sex trafficking networks, and that Donald Trump is working to expose and dismantle these networks, all while being continually hindered by a set of individuals and organizations referred to as ‘the deep state’.

An individual known as Q (a reference to a level of US security clearance) began posting somewhat coded messages known as ‘Q drops’ on Trump’s progress in dismantling the ‘liberal cabal’ on 4chan in late 2017, and continues to do so on 8kun. Support for the QAnon movement has grown exponentially since then, with supporters in over 25 countries and elected politicians championing its cause. While there are sporadic offline events at which QAnon supporters gather, a large proportion of their mobilization occurs on mainstream and fringe social media platforms. QAnon presence is most widely noted on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, however Discord, Telegram, Parler, and various message boards host significant QAnon support communities.

….

Conclusion
QAnon remains the most densely interconnected conspiratorial network that Graphika has studied. The evolution of this movement over the past two years indicates an increasing autonomy from mainstream right-wing online groups in the US, however network analysis suggests that these groups still prove useful for the amplification of QAnon messaging. As the US election draws closer, and public debate over Covid-19 continues, QAnon is likely to appeal to a number of distinct online communities with similar messaging. This will make it increasingly difficult to detect and disambiguate content and activity specific to the QAnon movement. Even in the past few weeks, there have been well-attended rallies and demonstrations centered around QAnon-adjacent causes taking place in many US cities. This appetite for offline participation raises security concerns and will likely entail a spike in exposure for QAnon slogans and rallying cries.

QAnon’s highly malleable ideology, coupled with its capacity for rapid content dissemination, allows the movement to appeal to new members by blending current events in the news cycle into an overarching anti-government worldview. This adaptability presents an opportunity for foreign actors to leverage the community by manipulating specific narratives that align with their interests. While no significant attempts to take advantage of the QAnon community for specific US election outcomes have been observed as of yet, this continues to be a possibility.

Meanwhile, QAnon theories and causes are finding purchase outside of the US as new national communities begin to apply these concepts to their local political landscapes and figures. The development of these relatively independent online ecosystems, which often have their own distinct influencers and terminologies, warrants greater attention. The international chapters of QAnon present a concern not only for democratic processes worldwide but also for the deterioration of trust in institutions.