We're taking a break this week, so we thought we'd re-release a timeless episode from the archives. This one is about the amorphous dimensions of what we call QAnon, some thoughts about why it's so hard to categorize, and the implications for detecting disinformation.

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We’ve been trying to figure out how many people actually buy into QAnon ideas. If you just lurk on the off brand video sites, you’d think that almost everyone was in on it.

Dozens of regional and national polls that have been conducted in the past couple years that try to get an accurate headcount for the number of Americans who support QAnon beliefs.

Something should be said here about the name QAnon. It’s not really a thing, even though it is a thing. There isn’t really a QAnon. There was the anonymous message board poster, or likely a couple of them, called “Q”. Then there are all the people who lapped all of it up.

When Q first went silent, the whole operation metastasized. Now there are possibly hundreds who continue amplifying those original ideas from the message board posts.

They aren’t just amplifying though, they added fun new twists to the Q story at almost every news cycle. What we’re calling QAnon isn’t really anything more than an amalgam of all of those ideas. The problem is that the complete set of related beliefs don’t always spread as a group.

This makes getting that head count extremely challenging since a lot of those ideas have filtered into our general discourse separate from any attachment to the original Q.

Extra reading:

https://www.westernjournal.com/new-poll-shatters-lefts-qanon-narrative-4-trump-supporters-believe

https://www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suffolk/documents/academics/research-at-suffolk/suprc/polls/issues-polls/2021/2_22_2021_marginals_pdftxt.pdf

https://heavy.com/news/qanon-support-polls

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-oan-vladimir-putin-russia-invasion-ukraine-1321632

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/26/opinion/republican-senators-qanon-ketanji-brown-jackson.html

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/10/20/half-trump-supporters-believe-qanon-theory-child-s

Music:

Nihilore - L'appel Du Vide (CC-BY-3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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