On Jan. 19, users of 8chan’s /qresearch/ board were rallying fellow QAnon believers for a day-old digital canvassing campaign. The campaign’s participants, who were anonymous to everyone, including each other, had specific and ambitious goals. They wanted to make the hashtag #releasethememo trend on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of making the “Nunes memo” a major point of discussion in the mainstream media. This, they hoped, would lead to the public release of the memo.
Did the campaign work? The overall #releasethememo campaign, of which 8chan anons played only a part, was wildly successful. An analysis by the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier found that #releasethememo campaign’s movement from social media to fringe media to mainstream media was “so swift that both the speed and the story itself became impossible to ignore.” The full extent of 8chan’s contribution is unknown, but the anons’ goals for the campaign (excepting the destruction of Q’s corrupt cabal enemies in the fictional QAnon world) were fully realized.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/18/how-conspiracy-theories-spread-internets-darkest-corners/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.962ae78936a6