On Jan. 6, 2021, QAnon conspiracy theorists played a significant role in inciting Donald Trump supporters to storm the Capitol building in D.C., hoping to overturn the 2020 election in favor of Trump.
Days later, Twitter suspended tens of thousands of QAnon accounts, effectively banning most users who promote the far-right conspiracy theory.
Now, a new study from Newsguard has uncovered that since Elon Musk acquired the company, QAnon has had a resurgence on X, formerly Twitter, over the past year.
QAnon grows on X
Tracking commonly used QAnon phrases like “QSentMe,” “TheGreatAwakening,” and “WWG1WGA” (which stands for “Where We Go One, We Go All”), Newsguard found that these QAnon-related slogans and hashtags have increased a whopping 1,283 percent on X under Musk.
From May 1, 2023 to May 1, 2024, there were 1.12 million mentions of these QAnon supporter phrases on X. This was a huge uptick from the 81,100 mentions just one year earlier from May 1, 2022 to May 1, 2023.
One of the most viral QAnon-related posts of the year, on the “Frazzledrip” conspiracy, has received more than 21.8 million views, according to the report. Most concerning, however, is that it was posted by a right-wing influencer who has specifically received support from Musk.
The Jan. 2024 tweet was posted by @dom_lucre, a user with more than 1.2 million followers who commonly posts far-right conspiracy theories. In July 2023, @dom_lucre was suspended on then-Twitter. Responding to @dom_lucre’s supporters, Musk shared at the time that @dom_lucre was “suspended for posting child exploitation pictures.”
Sharing child sexual abuse material or CSAM would result in a permanent ban on most platforms. However, Musk decided to personally intervene in favor of @dom_lucre and reinstated his account.
Since then, @dom_lucre has posted about how he earns thousands of dollars directly from X. The company allows him to monetize his conspiratorial posts via the platform’s official creator monetization program.
Musk has also previously voiced his support for Jacob Chansely, a QAnon follower known as the “QAnon Shaman,” who served prison time for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
The dangers of QAnon
QAnon’s adherents follow a number of far-right conspiracy theories, but broadly (and falsely) believe that former President Trump has been secretly battling against a global cabal of Satanic baby-eating traffickers, who just happen to primarily be made up of Democratic Party politicians and Hollywood elites.
Unfortunately, these beliefs have too often turned deadly. Numerous QAnon followers have been involved in killings fueled by their beliefs. In 2022, one Michigan man killed his wife before being fatally shot in a standoff with police. His daughter said her father spiraled out of control as he fell into the QAnon conspiracies. In 2021, another QAnon conspiracy theorists killed his two young children, claiming that his wife had “Serpent DNA” and his children were monsters.
Of course, QAnon never completely disappeared from social media platforms. Its followers still espoused their beliefs albeit in a more coded manner over the past few years to circumvent social media platforms’ policies. Now, though, QAnon believers are once again being more open about their radical theories.
The looming November 2024 Presidential election likely plays a role in the sudden resurgence of QAnon on X, as QAnon-believing Trump supporters look to help their chosen candidate. However, Musk and X have actively welcomed these users to their social media service, eagerly providing them with a platform to spread their dangerous falsehoods.
Musk is a useful idiot. He ruined Twitter and the US government quietly thanks him for it because it no longer serves as a tool to see unfiltered events happening on the ground (like Israel murdering Palestinians). So mission accomplished there
Yeah. Twitter back in the day actually used to be a usable substitute for print journalism, without the editorial bias and selective coverage. If you paid attention to who to follow, you could actually get a lot better picture of the world from Twitter than from almost anywhere else.
I don’t think the US government is alone in wanting that gone so they can control the narrative instead, but they’re definitely one party that was happy about it.
and now the new target is TikTok
And this is where you went straight off the fuckin deep end.
I do not know a single person who gets their picture of the world from Tiktok whose viewpoint isn’t reliably dogshit takes on literally every single issue. (Specific e.g. antivax, “BLM protestors are just running around beating people up, they have to be stopped,” “everyone’s moving out of California to Texas and Florida because Republican politics are better”) Maybe there’s an accidental alignment of pro-Palestine-protestors news from Tiktok right now, but it’s not like that narrative is un-heard-of in any MSM news or other social media. The whole landscape at this point is Palestine flags as far as I see, and the other platforms are usually a lot more nuanced and informative.
I don’t know why you’d object to an algorithm controlled by Elon Musk or the US government or just a lawful-evil alignment to sell advertising and hook people to dopamine loops and nothing else (all very good things to be suspicious of, yes), but all of a sudden when the Chinese government’s involved, you’re like “finally someone trustworthy to put in charge of public opinion, no way this can go wrong.”
TikTok is a weird beast. It can at the same time show the destruction in Gaza, Israeli soldiers poking fun at it, ASMR videos, mindless looping footage, fake AI idols, underage girls asking for payment from strangers, and siphon engagement data to train Chinese propaganda bots.
It’s the closest thing to “shove everything into a bowl, then shake”…
Calling Tiktok “the next target” does not strike me as the ringing endorsement of its noble pursuit of accurate news reporting you seem to be taking it for.
The person I was responding to, if I’ve read them right, was trying to argue that Tiktok was the next target because people could get unfiltered information about the world through it. My point was that Tiktok is about the worst possible tool for getting useful unfiltered information about the world that one could possibly imagine, and then adding some context and detail to that.
I don’t know, it just seemed to me they might have had in mind that whoever is trying to “control the narrative” would find competing disinformation campaigns just as unwelcome.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to lie or twist the truth. All it has to do is give people a window into what the US has been doing around the world for years. The US has done this to itself. The younger generations are onto the ruling class and their playbook is no longer working. They want to ban TikTok now because of the massive amount of unfiltered Gaza content it provides. I should note, TikTok simply promoting this stuff in its algorithm is enough (look up “Heating” in regards to TikTok).
It’s not about trusting TikTok. It’s about understanding that we have a terrible tech company, vs a terrible government. But at the same time, it has helped radicalize and inform so many in the ranks of Gen Z, amongst other generations. Even if you skip past the 24/7 stream of Gaza coverage ( which we absolutely need since Israel has murdered something like 121 journalists in Gaza), you’ll find videos of Gen Z and other folks making videos that layout documented history, protest methods, agitprop, and their own amateur journalism to others. That has value, even if the source is just in it for the notoriety and money. It’s an awkward position where it becomes a tool to the revolution, because it’s in opposition (for its own gain), but is never trustworthy.
But at the same time, it has helped radicalize and inform so many in the ranks of Gen Z, amongst other generations.
I know when I think of people I know who get most of their news from TikTok, I’m like “damn that person is super well informed and I’m always happy when I talk to them about politics and world events”
Out of all the platforms, every single other one of which including the one you’re on right now and the elephant one and Usenet and ZMag and Hackernews and all the rest
I do not know which reality you inhabit where TikTok invented people knowing about Gaza, but I promise you that there are better platforms, where you’re allowed to talk about drugs or alcohol or use the word “blood”, or “Uyghur”
It didn’t invent it. It just caught on at the right time and amplified that knowledge. It’s also a network. I don’t get TikTok but I’ve seen how popular it is in the new generations. This isn’t new knowledge; it’s just new packaging for a plugged-in-since-birth generation.
I’m too old for TikTok. Old Twitter, Reddit before it went to shit, niche message boards. That’s where I used to hang. Now it’s gathering communities I like on my own Lemmy server.
