Caught in a web of division and dismay
QAnon and proTrump online forums are struggling and fracturing in the aftermath of the US Capitol siege.
Ahuge chunk of Twitter’s QAnon community has vaporised, seemingly overnight. A pro-Trump message board has rebranded itself, jettisoning the former president’s name from its URL in its move towards a broader message. And other right-wing forums are grappling with internal rebellion and legal war.
Taken together, these developments since the January 6 Capitol attack raise questions about the long-term viability of pro-Trump online communities now that their inspirational leader has been impeached, lost his own Twitter account and left the White House.
Experts say the communities are likely to recover, but it’s less clear whether online activists central to Trump’s rise and political power will remain a large, coherent force in the years ahead.
‘‘This has been a bad month for the radical right on the internet,’’ said Will Partin, a research analyst at technology institute Data & Society.
A report evaluating Twitter’s January 11 enforcement action against QAnon accounts, released by network analysis firm Graphika, underscores the power that mainstream social media sites have to squelch hateful, violent and conspiratorial conversation when they choose to.
Graphika found that more than 60 per cent of a densely clustered network of nearly 14,000 QAnon accounts were now inactive.
The number of tweets from these accounts nearly doubled on the day of the siege, before steeply declining when Twitter banned Trump two days later. It fell further after Twitter closed more than 70,000 accounts a few days later, and the content from core QAnon accounts fell by more than 70 per cent, Graphika found.
But Graphika’s researchers also found signs of resilience among QAnon communities in other nations, especially Japan, where the impacts of Twitter’s enforcement action were less severe.
‘‘It’s not a question of if the QAnon community will persist – it certainly will,’’ said Melanie Smith, head of analysis for Graphika and co-author of the report. ‘‘Regardless of what happens with Donald Trump, the community has outgrown the theoretical, has entered the mainstream, and has sown roots globally.’’
The impacts described by Graphika broadly echo other
recent research, including a report last weekend by analytics company Zignal Labs that documented a 73 per cent decline in misinformation claiming electoral fraud after Trump’s ban from Twitter.
The action also damaged the anti-vaccine community on Twitter, with nearly half of the QAnon accounts that previously were active in conversations opposing the coronavirus vaccine now offline, Graphika found.
The Graphika report also found that calls to move to alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Telegram spiked on the day of the Capitol siege. But Parler was removed from Apple and Google’s app stores a few days later, and knocked offline entirely on January 11, when Amazon Web Services withdrew its hosting services because of Parler’s failure to moderate hateful posts, many of them advocating violence and renewed attacks.
Interpersonal squabbles also threaten how far-right online communities are organised and run.
The message board 8kun, QAnon’s online home, was riven by infighting this week after an outgoing moderator wiped a main QAnon forum in what he called an attack on the site’s leadership and the ‘‘poor dumb cattle’’ who frequent the site. The deleted material was restored soon afterwards by other moderators, but
the incident unleashed a torrent of angry posts, including calls for the moderator’s death.
QAnon’s central prophet, Q, has not posted any messages for 45 days, and it is unclear if or when the online figure will return.
‘‘The most hardcore QAnon followers are in disarray. After years of waiting for the ‘Great Awakening’, QAnon adherents are struggling with the fact that President Biden was successfully inaugurated,’’ said Daniel Jones, a former FBI analyst and Senate investigator who heads the nonpartisan research group Advance Democracy.
Still, Jones is not writing QAnon off. ‘‘We still have an uncomfortably large percentage of Americans that believe that the November election was ‘rigged,’ and they are going to find online spaces to connect,’’ he said.
TheDonald, an offshoot of a pro-Trump forum that Reddit banned last year, this week shifted its operations entirely to another site, Patriots.win, following what moderators called a ‘‘precarious situation’’ with its old domain.
The site’s leaders said a conflict with a moderator who recently left the team ‘‘out of fear for himself and those around him’’ had undermined the site, because the unnamed ‘‘rogue individual’’ had declined to redirect visitors to the site’s new home, and had stopped relaying
information to the that serve the site.
The site’s leaders also have voiced some notes of paranoia since the siege. One moderator posted an ‘‘important note’’ warning users that interlopers could attempt to transform the site into ‘‘an FBI honeypot’’. They have also cautioned that ‘‘the No 1 threat was a backstabbing by our own people’’.
TheDonald’s traffic in the US soared to 13 million website visits last month, up from 500,000 in December 2019, according to data from online analytics firm SimilarWeb. Traffic peaked on the day of the insurrection and has generally slowed since.
While TheDonald.win is now a dead link, the site’s moderators say the new domain has retained ‘‘at least 75 per cent of our traffic’’.
‘‘We’re incredibly important to the MAGA movement, and it would be a great disservice to try to take us down, especially during this tumultuous time,’’ one moderator wrote.
Other far-right groups have resettled on messaging apps such as Telegram. Several Proud Boys and QAnon channels on Telegram have grown by thousands of members since the siege. The service announced last week that it had removed dozens of neo-Nazi, white nationalist and other channels that had publicly called for violence.
Partin called the fragmenting of the hard-right community on the web a ‘‘double-edged sword’’.
‘‘Every time this group loses access to a service, they get pushed further underground, where it’s a little bit harder to regroup,’’ he said. ‘‘When you’re pushing the extremists away from mainstream visibility, you’re also pushing them closer together.’’
companies
‘‘We still have an uncomfortably large percentage of Americans . . . [who] are going to find online spaces to connect.’’ Daniel Jones, former FBI analyst and Senate investigator