Since the pandemic broke five months ago, the QAnon movement has only solidified its position as the benchmark conspiracy theory of the Trump era. Some social media users responded to surging cases by seeking out online QAnon communities for news and information about the coronavirus. Followers of the sprawling, deranged theory, one aspect of which posits that Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to battle and imprison a clandestine cabal of ultra-powerful pedophiles on a quest for world domination, claimed that COVID-19 was actually the president’s way of quietly locking up Illuminati-type figures. This led to celebrities like Oprah Winfrey landing in the news after QAnon followers made those claims go viral in Facebook and Twitter posts describing how federal agents were arresting entertainment stars on child trafficking charges.
Since the conspiracy’s rise in 2017, it has always been unclear just how many Trump supporters buy into it—even as the QAnon presence at the president’s rallies continues to grow dramatically. (During a Trump rally last year, an opening speaker recited the QAnon motto onstage.) But according to NBC News, a recent internal investigation conducted by Facebook has produced some rough data on the movement’s size, as it connected millions of the site’s users to massive QAnon groups and pages. The evaluation’s initial results identified that more than 1 million accounts are members of 10 notable QAnon Facebook groups, a feature that allows users with shared interests to create public or private spaces to interact and organize. Although the percentage of overlap between the groups is unknown, the investigation also looked into users who joined similar groups and pages, resulting in the total number of QAnon affiliated accounts surpassing 3 million.
Facebook will reportedly look at the results of the investigation to determine whether or not the site’s already massive population of QAnon supporters will be allowed to continue organizing unfettered. Last week, Facebook did ban a public QAnon group that had nearly 200,000 members, which was reportedly one of the largest such communities on the site. A spokesperson for the site told Reuters that the company is actively monitoring similar groups. In the spring, numerous other QAnon groups and pages on Facebook were permanently shut down due to “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the site said.
QAnon followers don’t just use Facebook to build up massive virtual communities, as these online interactions are bleeding out into the real world. Facebook recently found $12,000 worth of ads, according to NBC News, “praising, supporting, or representing” QAnon that have run on the site, including one ad—of 185 total—aimed at organizing a “QAnon March for Children” in Detroit.
Facebook asserts that the platform consistently take “action against accounts, Groups, and Pages tied to QAnon that break our rules,” stated a spokesperson, who requested anonymity in NBC’s report due to concerns that QAnon followers would retaliate against them personally. “We have teams assessing our policies against QAnon and are currently exploring additional actions we can take.”
As for how other platforms are handling the virally spreading theory, Twitter moved to ban 7,000 accounts that voice support for QAnon in a mass purging of 150,000 users in July; TikTok has blocked the use of several QAnon-related hashtags (though, popular batshit theories about child sex trafficking are still a problem on the video-sharing app); and Reddit banned the QAnon sub-forum on its site all the way back in 2018 for incitement of “violence.” The social media crackdown comes as several Republican congressional candidates—as well as the president—have amplified the conspiracy theory. Additionally, the real-world impact of the theory has veered into dangerous territory several times, including in 2018 when a Nevada man packed two assault-style rifles into an armored truck and blocked off Hoover Dam traffic in a stunt he described as a QAnon mission. That incident and others led the FBI’s Phoenix Field Office to label QAnon extremists as potential domestic terrorism threats, as a 2019 memo warned of the possibility for “both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.”
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