The Verge: Facebook's Big QAnon Purge Might Have Come Too Late
Before the Tide Pods challenge was a public health crisis, it was a joke. The laundry detergent capsules, which were originally released in 2012, evolved over time to look strangely delicious: lush green and blue gels, swirled around one another attractively, all but daring you to eat them. This led to many jokes about Tide Pods maybe secretly being candy, and it might have stopped there — but then people actually started eating them. The “Tide Pods challenge” surged on social networks in 2018, and ultimately more than 10,000 children were reported to have been exposed to whatever extremely inedible substance is actually inside Tide Pods. Of teenagers who were affected, more than a quarter of the cases were intentional, the Washington Post reported at the time.
Eventually platforms banned the Tide Pods challenge, and the mania around their consumption subsided. But the story posed questions to platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that they have struggled to answer ever since. When do you start to take a joke seriously? When does dumb talk cross the line into something dangerous? When does a lunatic conspiracy theory cross the line from a shitpost into a potential incitement to violence?
When, in other words, was the right time to ban any talk of the Tide Pod challenge?
Looking back, it seems clear that the answer is “sooner.” But “sooner” is still not an answer to when.
I thought about all this today reading about Facebook’s latest purge of accounts related to QAnon, the fringe theory that Donald Trump is an intelligent person working in secret to purge the country of Satanist pedophiles, while using lieutenants to send coded messages to 4chan users. (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny wrote a definitive piece on QAnon’s origins as a grift for NBC News in 2018.) On its face, this theory seems no less a joke than the idea that TidePods secretly taste delicious. But as with the laundry detergent, thousands of Americans have now been poisoned by QAnon, and the consequences seem likely to be far more dire, and long-lasting.
https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/8/20/21375381/facebook-qanon-purge-content-policy-tide-pods