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Covid a 'catalyst' for QAnon's rise in Europe
France24.com
Issued on: 15/09/2020 - 16:36
"QAnon, the US-based conspiracy about a Satan-worshipping, paedophile cabal secretly running the world, is taking root in Europe feeding on fears stirred up by the coronavirus outbreak, analysts say.
"Anti-vaxxers, white supremacists and government sceptics in Europe are starting to buy into the ill-defined but pro-Donald Trump conspiracy that emerged across the Atlantic in 2017.
"Dozens of European QAnon offshoots have sprung up online, while protesters have brandished Q-themed messages at demonstrations in Berlin, London and Paris denouncing face masks and other measures to curb the pandemic.
"While the conspiracy's growth in the US has been an outward and visible process, what has gone less noticed is QAnon's extensive root growth and spread in Europe," fake news monitor NewsGuard warned in a report in July. It identified the Covid-19 crisis as a "catalyst".
"QAnon posits that an anonymous, high-level government insider codenamed Q is working to expose an anti-Trump cabal that runs Satanic, international child-trafficking ring and is seeking to impose a "new world order".
"Trump has not disavowed the faceless, headless movement, heartily congratulating avowed QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor Greene after she won a Republican congressional primary contest in Georgia.
"- Exponential growth -
"We are witnessing the adaptation of these theories into EU-centered or even local narratives, where they merge with pre-existing conspiracies and groups," the NewsGuard report said.
"In July, the watchdog counted nearly 450,000 known followers of QAnon sites in France, Italy, Germany and Britain.
"NewsGuard's Europe editor Chine Labbe told AFP that numerous websites, pages, groups and accounts appeared in late 2019 and early 2020, and their following "continues to grow exponentially".
"In Europe, QAnon is spreading "the idea that the pandemic is part of a plan imposed by world elites with Bill Gates at the top to vaccinate most of the world's population," the NewsGuard report found.
"Some have also advanced the idea that social distancing, imposed to curb the virus's spread, was created by the CIA as a torture technique.
"Miro Dittrich, a German researcher who monitors online extremism, said it is not unusual for conspiracies to flourish in times of crisis. When people feel they have no control, they seek to blame an adversary.
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