My world on the web
The coronavirus pandemic has left us living more and more of our lives online. But the place where we chat with friends, get our news and form our opinions is full of vile and dangerous conspiracy theories. Is the world’s biggest social network doing enough to combat them?
Bullying, sexual abuse, political polarisation and conspiracy theorists all existed before the social network, but all took on new contours as they moved online.
One of the common threads with ‘QAnonCasualties’ is that others seem to live a different reality. The challenge with all of this is moderation. A part of the problem is the role served by celebrities in amplifying stories.
The tale of how Reddit squashed QAnon seems like it must hold a tangible lesson for the rest of the social web, but the internet is messier than that. The particularities of Reddit, its culture, and the timing of its QAnon purge cannot be replicated by other companies. QAnon has found fertile ground on even more mainstream sites than Reddit. It simply doesn’t need the platform anymore.
In a classical game or story you have a very distinct difference between those writing or designing and those playing. With QAnon you have this figure [Q] who has a stable identity and plants the seed frequently. But there’s just so many theories involved in the greater QAnon universe that are only tangentially related to the figure of Q. And you see this — QAnon has absorbed every other conspiracy theory. What would happen if Q stopped posting content forever? Would it die out? Maybe. But maybe not. And the reason it’s unclear is because so many people in the community have essentially built out their own theories and story lines and generated their own massive followings.