Facebook, QAnon and the World's Slackening Grip on Reality

It’s hard to describe the movement that Philip fell into. QAnon has its roots in the “pizzagate” conspiracy, which emerged four years ago after users poring over hacked Democratic party emails on the message board 4chan said that, if you replaced the word “pizza” with “little girl”, it looked as if they were discussing eating children. That claim – whether it was made in jest or sincerity is impossible to tell – spiralled into allegations of a vast paedophilic conspiracy centred on Comet Pizza, a restaurant in Washington DC.

A year later, a 4chan user with the handle “Q Clearance Patriot” appeared, claiming to be a government insider tasked with sharing “crumbs” of intel about Donald Trump’s planned counter-coup against the deep state forces frustrating his presidency. As Q’s following grew, the movement became known as the Storm – as in, “the calm before …” – and then QAnon, after its founder and prophet. At that point, QAnon was a relatively understandable conspiracy theory: it had a clear set of beliefs rooted in support for Trump and in the increasingly cryptic posts attributed to Q (by then widely believed to be a group of people posting under one name).

Now, though, it’s less clearcut. There’s no one set of beliefs that define a QAnon adherent. Most will claim some form of mass paedophilic conspiracy; some, particularly in the US, continue to focus on Trump’s supposed fightback. But the web of beliefs has become all-encompassing. One fan-produced map of all the “revelations” linked to the group includes references to Julius Caesar, Atlantis and the pharaohs of Egypt in one corner, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and 5G in another, the knights of Malta in a third, and the Fukushima meltdown in a fourth – all tied together with a generous helping of antisemitism, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to hatred of George Soros. QAnon isn’t one conspiracy theory any more: it’s all of them at once.

In September, BuzzFeed News made the stylistic decision to refer to the movement as a “collective delusion”. “There’s more to the convoluted entity than the average reader might realise,” wrote BuzzFeed’s Drusilla Moorhouse and Emerson Malone. “But delusion does illustrate the reality better than conspiracy theory does. We are discussing a mass of people who subscribe to a shared set of values and debunked ideas, which inform their beliefs and actions.”

At first, QAnon was a largely US phenomenon, with limited penetration in the UK. The pandemic, however, has changed that. According to recent polling by Hope Not Hate, one in four people in Britain now agree with some of the basic conspiracies it has promulgated: that “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”, and that “elites in Hollywood, politics, the media” are secretly engaging in large-scale child trafficking and abuse. Nearly a third believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together”, and almost a fifth say that Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan”. (...)

For many, the existence of Facebook – and its sister products, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – has been a lifeline in this period. The social network has always prided itself on connecting people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack.

But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a “perfect storm for misinformation”. And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it’s easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour’s? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all? (...)

Facebook has become a centre point of civil society. It’s more than just a place to share photos and plan parties: it’s where people read news, arrange protests, engage in debate, play games and watch bands. And that means that all the problems of civil society are now problems for Facebook: bullying, sexual abuse, political polarisation and conspiracy theorists all existed before the social network, but all took on new contours as they moved online.

And this year they really moved online. As the initial lockdown was imposed across much of the world, people’s relationship to the internet, and to Facebook in particular, evolved rapidly. Stuck socially distancing, people turned to social networking to fill an emotional void.

Suddenly, the company found itself staring at unprecedented demands. “Our busiest time of the year is New Year’s Eve,” says Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, over a Zoom call from her London home. “And we were seeing the equivalent of New Year’s Eve every single day.” It was, she says, the inevitable result of having “almost the entire planet at home at the same time”.

Rachel agrees. “I believe the lockdown played a huge part in altering people’s perception of reality,” she says. When Covid restrictions came in, the rules of social interaction were rewritten. We suddenly stopped meeting friends in pubs, at the coffee point or by the school gates, and our lives moved online. And for many of us, “online” meant “on Facebook”.

by Alex Hern, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images