How conspiracy theories spread from the Internet’s darkest corners
QAnon’s “researchers” have figured out how to shape national conversations.
By Travis View
Travis View is a marketer, writer, and conspiracy theory researcher.
September 18, 2018
On July 7, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and frequent Fox News contributor, published a tweet that contained startling but inaccurately sourced statistics about the alleged growth of human trafficking arrests under the Trump administration. It stated there were 1,952 human trafficking arrests through all of 2016, but in the first half of 2018 authorities had already made an astounding 5,987 human trafficking arrests. Kirk’s tweet falsely claimed these figures came from the Justice Department.
Kirk deleted the tweet shortly after the true source of its figures was revealed: the notorious imageboard 8chan, home of the QAnon conspiracy “researchers” of the /qresearch/ board. The board’s “research,” which consisted of sloppily compiling information from nationwide news reports about human trafficking and child pornography arrests and charges, seeks to support a core belief of the QAnon conspiracy theory — that Trump is secretly battling a corrupt deep state and an evil cabal of pedophile Satan-worshiping elites. QAnon believers think if they can show that more human traffickers are being arrested, it will support the baseless notion that Trump is finally putting an end to long-protected trafficking rings used by these elites.
Though Kirk may not have realized it at first, he had bought into the collective fantasy of some of the Internet’s most outré Trump fans.
People sometimes dismiss the “anons” — the term users of the chan message boards employ to describe themselves — as a group of amoral pranksters. 4chan anons, for example, gained notoriety for leading a campaign against the HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US art project and its creators. The campaign led to the vandalization of the artwork and stalking of the artists. But 8chan’s success in spreading QAnon suggests that targeted harassment is merely one of the ways they can inflict real world damage. Namely, they represent a political force that can craft resonant narratives and push them through major social media networks into the mainstream. They sometimes half-jokingly refer to their community’s combination of intense focus and tech savviness in the pursuit of real-world impact as “weaponized autism.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/18/how-conspiracy-theories-spread-internets-darkest-corners/?utm_term=.0239d6e355da
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