Facebook proudly announced to the world this week that it is taking steps to shut down pages and accounts related to the bizarre, Trump-loving conspiracy theory movement QAnon. The social media giant says it took down the QAnon activity—along with material from the white nationalist website VDare and some foreign sites, including several from Russia—while investigating suspected engagement in coordinated “inauthentic behavior.” In its April report, the company said: “We are making progress rooting out this abuse, but as we’ve said before, it’s an ongoing effort.”
But a light scratch of the surface of their announcement reveals that the move is at best a lame, half-hearted gesture while social media giant resolutely refuses to confront its long-running problem: Being a willing platform for not only false information but incendiary smears and conspiracy theories built on the falsehoods. These are smears and conspiracy theories that produce real-world violence as well as a multitude of other consequences caused by spreading misinformation during a pandemic.
Facebook’s announcement is in fact quite constricted in its language:
We removed 5 Pages, 20 Facebook accounts, and 6 Groups that originated in the US and focused domestically. Our investigation linked this activity to individuals associated with the QAnon network known to spread fringe conspiracy theories. We found this activity as part of our internal investigations into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior ahead of the 2020 election in the US.
“Coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as The Verge notes, describes accounts and pages “that mislead people about their identity and intentions, whether or not the information they spread is accurate.”
In other words, those QAnon pages were removed not because they spread wildly false smears but because the people operating them broke Facebook’s rules about false or double identities. And as journalist/researcher Travis View notes, Facebook’s actions were a mere drop in the bucket at best.
“Facebook only removed five pages and six groups,” View told Daily Kos. “I'm not sure of the total number of Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon is, but a quick search on Facebook just now pulled up over 80.”
Moreover, View adds, those six QAnon groups “were not removed because they are QAnon groups. They were removed because they engaged in ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior,’ most likely for monetary gain. In other words, the sin that got those groups and pages removed was gaming Facebook, not promoting extremism.”
This continues Facebook’s long-running refusal to recognize the problems related to providing a platform for both false information and incendiary conspiracism—particularly the terroristic violence that erupts from the spread of these ideas through social media. As the Tech Transparency Project recently explored, Facebook has been similarly reluctant to remove pages and posts related to the shared violent fantasy of an imminent “Boogaloo” civil war.
“The fact that Facebook is letting such activity proliferate, despite explicit threats of violence to government authorities, is another sign of the company’s inability to manage harmful content on its platform—even among groups that make no secret of their intentions,” the report observes.
Nor is Facebook alone in this, particularly when it comes to QAnon material. Both Instagram and Twitter remain QAnon hotbeds, too. The mainstreaming effect of all this is manifested by John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence, who avidly follows QAnon accounts on Twitter.
The companies operating these platforms all insist on a “free speech” exemption for the false information, probably because any kind of effective fact-checking standard would require massively expensive—not to mention logistically and legally problematic—oversight operations. The result is that QAnon, the “Boogaloo,” and other violent, rhetoric-spewing conspiracies that have been spreading unchecked on social media. It has also been making its presence felt in the recent wave of anti-lockdown protests, where QAnon signs have been popping up aplenty.
Unsurprisingly, that spread has manifested in increasingly unhinged real-world behavior in recent weeks:
- A woman from Illinois, a relatively recent QAnon convert, Facebook livestreamed her drive from her home to New York City with a car full of knives as she ranted about her plan to “take out Joe Biden” when she arrived there. Jessica Prim, 37, was arrested by New York police after she began acting strangely on a city pier. She posted video of her arrest on Facebook, as The Daily Beast notes, in which “she ranted about saving children and claimed she had come to New York because of an internet conspiracy theory video about a ‘cabal’ of pedophile Democrats.”
- In Australia, QAnon fans have begun smashing their TV screens—and posting boastful videos of the acts on social media—because they wanted to protest the media “telling us what to think.” The TV-smashing trend originated with a QAnon Facebook group claiming to “represent the 99 percent.” The protest group leader filmed a video in which he raised a TV above his head and smashed it into concrete, declaring: “No longer will we be programmed!”
- Shortly after the arrest of two Americans for participating in an amateurish attempt at toppling Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in a coup, it emerged that not only did both men work for a company, Silvercorp, that claimed to have acted as security for Donald Trump in 2018, but one of them—Airan Berry, a Special Forces veteran—is a devoted QAnon believer. Motherboard reported that on Instagram that it found “more than 10 ‘Q’ and truther accounts followed by Berry, some with tens of thousands of followers spreading, among other absurd conspiracies, blatant misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, which is helping fuel dangerous protests across the country defying social distancing orders. He is also following the hashtags ‘#qarmy’ and ‘#qanon8kun.’”
Worryingly, the QAnon movement is also insinuating itself within the mainstream, particularly within the Republican Party. Media Matters, which has been keeping a running count of how many Republican candidates around the country have explicitly embraced QAnon conspiracies, reports in its most recent update (via Alex Kaplan) that at least four QAnon-supporting congressional candidates will be on the ballot this coming November. Three of those will be in California, and one in Ohio. Another—candidate Samuel Williams in Texas’s 16th District—faces a primary runoff this summer.
“It’s more of a cult than other conspiracy theories,” political science professor and conspiracy theory expert Joseph Uscinski told The New York Times. “QAnon is not just an idea; it’s an ongoing thing that people can sort of get into and follow along with that keeps them entertained.”