What is QAnon? What Do You Need to Know About It?

QAnon is a conspiracy theory, in which one believes that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running a global child sex-trafficking ring. Typically this belief also involves United States President Donald Trump, who they believe is battling the ring, and leading to a “day of reckoning” involving the mass arrest of journalists and politicians.

Although preceded by similar viral conspiracies such as Pizzagate, the theory proper began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by “Q”, who was presumably an American individual, but most likely has become a group of people. Q claimed to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States.

NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for profit. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters, such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (High-Level Insider), CIAAnon, and WH Insider Anon.

Q has accused many liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking officials of being members of the cabal. Q also claimed that Trump feigned conspiracy with Russians to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring and preventing a coup d’état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros.

“Q” is a reference to the Q clearance used by the U.S. Department of Energy. QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto “Where We Go One, We Go All.” QAnon adherents began appearing at Trump reelection campaign rallies in August 2018.

TV and radio personality Michael “Lionel” Lebron, a promoter of the theory, was granted a photo opportunity with Trump in the Oval Office in August 2018. Bill Mitchell, a broadcaster who promotes QAnon, attended a White House “social media summit” in July 2019.

At an August 2019 rally, a man warming up the crowd before Trump spoke used the QAnon motto “where we go one, we go all”, later denying that it was a QAnon reference. This occurred hours after the publication of a report that the FBI had determined QAnon to be a potential source of domestic terrorism, the first time the agency had so rated a fringe conspiracy theory.

According to analysis conducted by Media Matters, as of August 2020, Trump had amplified QAnon messaging at least 216 times by retweeting or mentioning 129 QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts, sometimes multiple times a day. Into 2020, the number of QAnon adherents was unclear, but they had a large presence on social media, particularly Twitter.

In June 2020, Q exhorted followers to take a “digital soldiers oath”, and many did, using the Twitter hashtag #TakeTheOath. In July 2020, Twitter banned thousands of QAnon-affiliated accounts and changed its algorithms to reduce the theory’s spread.

A Facebook internal analysis reported in August found millions of followers across thousands of groups and pages; Facebook acted to remove and restrict QAnon activity later that month. Followers had also migrated to dedicated message boards such as EndChan and 8kun, where they organized to wage information warfare to influence the 2020 elections.

The featured image for this article is via Wikipedia Commons. It was originally posted to Flickr by marcn.