Donald Trump’s press secretary and vice president claimed they had not heard the recent praise he offered to QAnon followers and tried to frame concern over Trump’s unapologetic embrace of the conspiracy movement as a media obsession. “The media talks a lot about this so-called QAnon. I’ve never heard the president mention it,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News on Thursday, per Politico. “I talk to him oftentimes 10 times a day. Not once have I heard him mention this group. The media can focus on QAnon, but this president is focused on the American people.” She added that Trump “has not at all looked into who QAnon is,” something the president said Wednesday when he expressed gratitude to QAnon followers who support him.
Mike Pence also claimed he “didn’t hear anything” about the president embracing the movement and rather “heard the president talk about how he appreciates people that support him.” Speaking to CNN’s John Berman, Pence tried to play off the question as testament to the media’s alleged fixation on the movement, the urgent threat of which he dismissed as one of many “shiny objects” that the media “chases after.”
“This is not a shiny object,” Berman replied. “The FBI considers this a dangerous group.”
Facebook is reportedly outlining how they will combat potential efforts on their platform to undermine the legitimacy of the election results, with the New York Times noting that QAnon conspiracists are, like the president himself, a domestic threat to the democratic process. Following Russian interference in 2016, tech companies have been focusing election meddling concerns on foreign actors. But the right-wing conspiracy group’s increasing presence has forced big tech to consider the threat that Americans themselves could pose to the nation’s electoral system.
According to the Times, a Facebook employee said the company is preparing a response to hypothetical election situations such as “if hackers backed by a nation-state leaked documents online, or if a nation-state unleashed a widespread disinformation campaign at the last minute to dissuade Americans from going to the poll.” Twitter is developing its policies to “better identify, understand, and mitigate threats to the public conversation, both before or after an election,” said the company’s vice president of public policy Jessica Herrera-Flanigan.
Among the strategies Facebook is considering is a “kill switch” on postelection political ads—which the company, citing its commitment to free speech, does not monitor for misinformation—that could be used to spread false claims. Trump has already ramped up his efforts to delegitimize November’s election in recent weeks, sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the mail-in voting as well as the Postal Service’s ability to facilitate the method. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the possibility of the president invalidating the election results puts the company “in unprecedented territory.”
On Wednesday, Facebook took action against more than 13,000 groups, pages, and Instagram accounts that espoused the baseless claims of QAnon and “discussed potential violence,” though the crackdown may be too late. In recent weeks, NBC reported that events organized on Facebook by QAnon supporters or sympathizers have been taking the conspiracy theory offline and onto dozens of city streets. “Save the Children” events claiming to be protesting child trafficking and pedophilia—but that are rooted in the baseless QAnon theory of a secret “deep state” effort against Trump by a group of child-molesting elites—have popped up in places like Spokane, Washington, where those in attendance wielded posters of cryptic QAnon-related acronyms and hashtags along with Save the Children signs. According to NBC, more than 200 “Save the Children” events are scheduled to take place nationwide on Saturday. While not all are openly advocating the unhinged theories of the conspiracy movement, recent data shows that the most active conversations about #SaveOurChildren are taking place in Facebook groups and on Instagram accounts tied to QAnon.