QAnon's Dominion voter fraud conspiracy theory reaches the president
For days after the election, adherents to the QAnon conspiracy movement had been trying to get President Donald Trump’s attention with constant false claims about voter fraud connected to a company that makes voting machines.
On Thursday, they celebrated. Trump tweeted in all-caps about a conspiracy theory that baselessly alleges that Dominion Voting Systems, a company that makes voting machines, “deleted” millions of Trump votes, citing a report on the far-right cable news outlet One America News Network.
While the theory has already been debunked - including by Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with national security related to the internet and technology -Trump's tweet offered a sliver of energy at a time when the QAnon movement had stalled, waiting for its leader, “Q,” to return with guidance from a hiatus that began on the morning of Election Day and lasted more than a week.
But QAnon is far from done. The movement's recent evolution and activity around the Dominion conspiracy theory highlight how even Joe Biden's election win and the disintegration of the broader QAnon narrative do not spell the end of the broader conspiracy ecosystem it has built.
Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks misinformation, found that 1 in 7 tweets about “#Dominion” since Nov. 5 originated from accounts that self-identified as QAnon accounts. Tweets featuring the #Dominion hashtag rose from about 75 tweets per day to over 35,700 each day in the last week.
QAnon adherents had been reeling in the last week, as the conspiracy prophecy had seemingly failed. The conspiracy theory posited that Trump was secretly working to save the world from a cabal of high-profile Democrats who murder children to appease Satan, and that an anonymous user named “Q” on the extremist website 8kun was outlining his secret plan to round up and execute them.
SAUCE: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/q-fades-qanon-s-dominion-voter-fraud-conspiracy-theory-reaches-n1247780
KEKKING HARD RIGHT NOW, THEY'RE AFRAID