Facebook, Twitter flounder in QAnon crackdown
CHICAGO — Facebook and Twitter promised to stop encouraging the growth of the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon, which fashions President Donald Trump as a secret warrior against a supposed child-trafficking ring run by celebrities and government officials, after it reached an audience of millions on their platforms this year.
But the social media companies still aren’t enforcing even the limited restrictions they’ve recently put in place to stem the tide of dangerous QAnon material, a review by The Associated Press found. Both platforms have vowed to stop “suggesting” QAnon material to users, a powerful way of introducing QAnon to new people.
But neither has actually succeeded at that.
On Wednesday, hours after a chaotic debate between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, a video from a QAnon account that falsely claimed Biden wore a wire to cheat during the event was trending on Twitter, for example.
Twitter is even still running ads against QAnon material, in effect profiting off the type of tweets that it has vowed to limit. In some cases Facebook is still automatically directing users to follow public and secret QAnon pages or groups, the AP found.
“Their algorithm worked to radicalize people and really gave this conspiracy theory a megaphone with which to expand,” Sophie BjorkJames, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who studies QAnon, said of social platforms. “They are responsible for shutting down that megaphone. And time and time again they are proving unwilling.”
The QAnon phenomenon sprawls across a patchwork of secret Facebook groups, Twitter accounts and YouTube videos. QAnon has been linked to real-world violence such as criminal reports of kidnapping and dangerous claims that the Coronavirus is a hoax. But the conspiracy theory has also seeped into mainstream politics. Several Republican running for Congress this year are QAnon-friendly.
Although restricted to the backwaters of the Internet for years, QAnon posts reached millions of people via social media this year. Interactions — primarily likes and comments — with public Facebook and Instagram posts that included QAnon terms began climbing in March. By July, they received more attention than at any other point in the last year, according to an AP analysis of data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that helps track material on the platforms.
That month, public posts on Facebook-owned Instagram featuring the #QAnon hashtag received an average of 1.27 million likes and comments every week, according to the analysis. Some of those posts included news stories about QAnon. But the majority of the most popular Instagram posts during July were expressing support for the conspiracy theory, President Donald Trump, or far-right conservative causes, the AP found.