QAnon: The Clear and Present Danger of a Networked Conspiracy Theory
I grew up in the '60s in small town America. There was that big house on the corner right down the street - the one with the mansard roof that people said was haunted. Inside was a cranky old gentleman living alone, everybody was afraid of him. All us kids thought he killed his wife and children with a rusty axe (but we knew that wasn't really true). Of course we did cross over to the other side of the street when we had to walk past the house.
Everybody in town knew stories from the old man. He told Roger down at the barbershop that there was a pedaphile ring in town. The guys down at Stanley's Newsstand said he had an off the wall theory that our state's senior US senator was a satan worshiper who drank blood from victims of the pediphile ring. And the waitress down at Elkton Diner overheard him talking about an evil cabal controlling the state legislature.
My conclusion growing up was that the elderly gentleman was the only one who was off his rocker and believed this stuff - most of the other people in town seemed to me to be pretty much normal. However, it is now obvious that this is not at all true - the cranky old man isn't the only one.
Surprisingly, in fact, it has turned out that there are millions of people who are prepared to believe in cabals of blood drinking devil worshipers, scattered throughout our country. But back in the '60s, there was no internet to connect these crazy people together, so they were isolated and pretty much powerless. Further, since there appeared to be so few of them around, you could write them off as cranks.
Not so anymore. Not since QAnon was started back in November of 2017.
Fast forward to the year 2020
There is now a town, just like the one I grew up in, back in the '60s.
But it is not physical - it is a virtual town. A town called QAnon.
(Actually, given its size, it's more like a very large virtual city.)
In this virtual metropolis, every single person believes that there is a worldwide cabil of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, controlling politicians, controlling the media and controlling Hollywood. Every single person in the 'city' also believes that Donald Trump knows all about this evil cabal's wrongdoing - one of the reasons he was elected was to put an end to them.
(There is much more to it, and you can read all about it here and here and here. The Wikipedia page has a fair summary too.)
These cityfolk are all neighbors - the internet brought these people together from each of their separate physical locations. They are completely united and linked together, having one thing in common: belief in an unusual conspiracy theory - a theory that is backed up by 'facts' - which provide easy explanations for much of what is so confusing about our complex world.
You may want to know how this happened.
The Long Tail
Online communities have indeed been spontaneously forming on the internet since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. These legitimate and useful virtual congregations of like-minded individuals (tied together by their common interests) have been based on platforms that range from very early electronic bulletin boards to the more modern YouTube and Facebook groups. And everything in between.
In effect, the web has made the physical distance disappear between people with somewhat rare hobbies or special beliefs. Social scientists call this the "long tail" phenomenon and it exists today very broadly out on the internet - whether you are a model railroader, a bluegrass musician, or perhaps you are into stamp collecting. With or without Facebook, you can now easily find "your people" out on the internet starting with a simple Google search.
In the past, this completely innocent grouping of people on the World Wide Web was a matter of convenience and benefited everyone involved. More recently, because of new social media algorithms, the gathering together of these like-minded people on the internet is now considerably more efficient.
And, as we will see next, it has become considerably more insidious as well.
Facebook's Collaborative Filtering
Facebook has been able to hire some of the best software engineers on the planet. And they used some very advanced computer science techniques to create what Facebook calls their Recommender Systems.
As illustrated in the picture, Facebook's recommender system brings people with a common interest together. Here is how they describe it:
- At Facebook, [our recommender system] might include pages, groups, events, games, and more. [It] is based on the idea that the best recommendations come from people who have similar tastes. In other words, it uses historical item ratings of like-minded people to predict how someone would rate an item.
Implementing this idea at scale is not at all easy. The average data set used in their recommender system has 100 billion ratings, a billion users and millions of items. So it is absolutely gargantuan in size.
This is both a problem and an opportunity. The problem is the massive scale, which can be solved by smart computer scientists. The opportunity is that the enormous amount of data gives Facebook the ability to be both uncannily accurate and extremely precise in their recommendations.
Facebook is thusly able to reach literally billions of people around the world with a suggestion to take action (such as joining a group) that seems to be completely bespoke... tailor-made just for them personally. And they filter to such a point of remarkable precision that sometimes they end up selecting for - and bringing together - some very off-the-wall personality types.
The algorithm behind all of this is called Collaborative Filtering. It is indeed masterful in its accuracy, efficiency and reach. There is an excellent technical white paper published by Facebook if you are interested in the nitty gritty details.
So Facebook's Collaborative Filtering computer code went out on the internet, discovered and connected together all the people around the country who would buy into an idea as specific and as egregious as a pedaphile pizza parlor.
This is presumably an unintended consequence of Facebook's algorithms. The fact that automated computer code can bring together and empower such a vast number of like minded thinkers into a conspiracy network such as QAnon is unprecedented, and as we will see, can be very dangerous.
QAnon: Where We Go One We Go All - Now in the Millions
QAnon began with an anonymous post on 4chan from a supposedly high-clearance individual named Q. Over the next several months, three enterprising business people took the idea to broader platforms, including Reddit and YouTube so they could make some money. As the group migrated to Facebook, it was gobbled up by the company's aforementioned automated recommender systems, which quickly unearthed a huge nation-wide scale, willing-to-believe and primed-for-action target audience.
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This has caused QAnon to very recently explode in scale, even making its way into the rallies of President Trump. The Wall Street Journal reports that the top 10 public QAnon Facebook groups grew 600% to about 40,000 members per group in the last three months. Recent NBC news reporting has uncovered that there are multiple millions of people on Facebook in QAnon-themed groups (Facebook has recently launched internal investigations regarding QAnon and is evaluating future actions).
Moving Like a School of Fish
What one believes, they all believe.
Or, as they say, Where We Go One We Go All.
As the above QAnon motto promises, this enormous group of people can indeed act and move as a unit - even more efficiently than more conventional groups, like say the Republican Party, or the AFL CIO.
Several well-founded psychological principles such as social proof, confirmation bias and the costly signaling theory significantly strengthen the bond between members of QAnon, and allow the community to form a very coherent unit.
Like a school of fish, QAnon can turn synchronously, on a dime, if needed.
A Growing Political Power Base
And as such, these folks have power. Power to influence legislation. Power to elect people. Power to grab headlines. Power to attract more people to their cause. Power to run for Congress and probably be elected in November of 2020.
Relearning Lessons from the Red Scare of the '50s
Conspiracy theorists have been in power in the US before, and even without the power of the internet or Facebook's collaborative filtering, they have done plenty of damage.
Most especially, a certain US Senator from Wisconsin, who famously asked, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"
Here are a few of the blacklisted names that Senator Joseph McCarthy and his counterparts in the House of Representatives (Committee on Unamerican Activities) went after. Many of these careers were tragically and senselessly ruined.
- Charlie Chaplin
- Harry Belafonte
- Jackie Robinson
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
- Langston Hughes
- Orson Welles
- Leonard Bernstein
- Lena Horne
- Dalton Trumbo
- Dorothy Parker
- Pete Seeger
- Thousands of Chinese - American Citizens
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