QAnon Crashes The Internet Party

Is it too late to keep the amorphous online conspiracy movement from breaking into the mainstream?

- Daniel Zuidijk

Imagine it’s Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, the one where the entire extended family shows up. There’s a little corner of the long dinner table where you put the relatives most likely to be awkward, so they can chat among themselves. You know who they are, the uncle and cousins who go on rants about Trump’s righteous war against an international cabal of pedophiles or Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest. Everyone else in the family remembers the stir that corner caused when they claimed that Tom Hanks had a sex slave. No one with any sense took them seriously. Picking a fight would sap your energy and divide the clan.

For the most part, social media companies have been content to treat QAnon like those relatives. (And those are actual QAnon beliefs.) None of the tech giants were really happy the amorphous online conspiracy movement was at their party, but it wasn’t worth the trouble to disinvite them. As long as they kept to their own corner of the internet, the QAnon faithful could enjoy turkey and stuffing with everyone else.

But everything has changed. In the annus horribilis of 2020, the social networks can no longer afford to treat QAnon the same way. Why? Because it’s left its corner and is messing with the rest of the table.