The first time Mike Rains encountered the QAnon movement, he immediately knew it was bad news. The forty-something casino worker from Boston, US had some personal experience, having once been obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the possibility that 9/11 might be an inside job.
And so, late last year, he volunteered to help run a Reddit forum supporting "QAnon casualties" – the spouses, friends and family members left stunned by their loved ones’ sudden and total obsession with Satanic paedophile cults and child sex trafficking.
Before Covid, QAnon Casualties was a "small niche community" with perhaps 2-3,000 members. Today it has 12-15,000, and fills up every hour with new stories of arguments, divorces, whole social circles converted to the cause, and in one case domestic violence.
"They’re left absolutely speechless," says Rains, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym. "How did this happen? How [is it] that this nonsense on the internet is all they care about, all they talk about, all they think about, all they study on YouTube every moment of the day?
"The most heartbreaking part is that people ask me, how do they get their loved one back? And I’m just like, ‘you really can’t’."
It is just one consequence of the tidal wave of conspiracy theories that has consumed the US presidential election. False rumours, wild hoaxes and deliberate disinformation, often incubated and amplified by social networks, are now ubiquitous across the political spectrum, spread by everyone from state-sponsored trolls through campaigners for national park funding to high-level politicians.
The lifespan of a conspiracy theory in Trump’s America
On the Right, Hispanic voters were bombarded with WhatsApp messages accusing Democrats of paedophilia, while YouTubers touted old videos of voter fraud in Russia as new footage from America.
On the Left, spammers in Pakistan seized on the George Floyd protests to stream years-old police brutality footage on Facebook Live, while a dubious claim that Mr Trump was considering resignation went viral without any evidence.
Misinformation has been spotted on the teenagers’ meme app iFunny, the neighbourhood social network NextDoor and in a Facebook group for caravan devotees, whose administrator told the Telegraph he had frozen admissions following a spate of "whack-job conspiracy nonsense".
"It’s not just the Russians anymore," says Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. "We know the Russians are out there, Iran is out there; it’s sort of a free-for-all at this point. But what’s different from 2016 [is] the role of domestic influencers."
Not that rival states are slacking off: intelligence chiefs and cybersecurity researchers have fingered China and possibly North Korea as well as Russia and Iran. Ms DiResta says governments have been forced to adapt to the tech giants’ crackdowns, which have nixed many of their old bot tactics and cut the followers of their front operations.
According to Theresa Payton, a top cybersecurity official under President George W Bush and author of Manipulated: Inside the Cyberwar to Hijack Elections and Distort the Truth, authoritarian regimes have blended intelligence techniques and common digital commerce tools to create powerful information warfare doctrines, with their hacking and troll units often self-funded through clickbait adverts or cryptocurrency schemes.
She also believes foreign governments "absolutely" pounced on QAnon and the Floyd protests.
But the techniques made famous by Russian’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) have also been enthusiastically embraced by Americans. In 2016 the IRA drew thousands to real-world rallies; 2020’s equivalent was a Bernie Sanders supporter who pranked hundreds of Right-wingers to the scene of an imaginary flag burning.
One recent Facebook takedown targeted an Arizona marketing agency using IRA-like tactics, including fake personas with computer-generated faces, on behalf of an established conservative campaign group.
Is everyone just a Russian troll now? "That is actually not so far from the truth," says Kate Starbird, who studies online conspiracy theories at the University of Washington. "We see information operations and even foreign operations blend with what seems to be legitimate activism, and it’s hard to tease out the difference."
Ms DiResta says that so-called "super spreader" users, who post the same claim to dozens of Facebook groups, often turn out to be "a real person who’s just very passionate".
Dozens of candidates have tied themselves to the strongly pro-Trump QAnon
Credit: Getty Images North America
As well as this bottom-up misinformation there is what researchers call the "top-down" brand. Dozens of candidates have tied themselves to the strongly pro-Trump QAnon, with some, such as the Congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Green, being full-bore acolytes.
In a survey, journalists around the world identified "political leaders and elected officials" as a top source of disinformation, second only to "regular citizens".
All of this makes it far harder for social networks to police the problem. Domestic speakers are shielded by America’s first amendment, and more likely to have the ear of the two main parties.
Although Facebook is crushing QAnon with belated aggression, removing 19,800 groups and 20,000 Instagram accounts, its attempt to limit a negative New York Post story about Joe Biden provoked fiery blowback.
Some US agencies have also stepped up, with the state of Colorado spinning up a dedicated debunking team and Pentagon hackers at the ready to take troll farms offline. Yet some official attempts are already running into blockage from the highest authority.
Donald Trump has repeatedly retweeted QAnon supporters
Credit: REUTERS
Mr Trump’s role in the "infodemic" is unavoidable: he has repeatedly retweeted QAnon supporters, as well as Leftist pranksters, and has boosted or started some of 2020’s hottest political fictions. One study branded him the biggest spreader of coronavirus misinformation, while a government whistleblower has accused him of attempting to suppress evidence of Russian meddling.
On Tuesday the White House declared that he had "end[ed] the Covid-19 pandemic", even as the US reported almost 75,000 new cases.
What comes next? The Alethea Group, a disinformation tracking firm, expects polling day to bring mass false claims about Covid outbreaks, false reports of violence and impossible-to-verify claims about voting chicanery.
It hardly helps that some of those things may also happen for real, with many experts braced for voter intimidation or outright terrorism, not least from QAnon.
Observers are divided as to whether the movement would die off or grow stronger should Mr Trump lose. Mr Rains, who happily describes himself as a do-or-die Democrat, is cynical: "In the 2024 election you’re going to have a QAnon primary, where Republicans will have to cater to QAnon believers to get their votes."
QAnon believers would probably agree – a rare moment of bipartisan consensus in a country that seems to be splitting apart.
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