It read, “Q-ANON … i want to believe, but let’s be honest, it’s bullshit.” Reddit has plenty of problems, but QAnon isn’t one of them. Yesterday morning, the most popular post about QAnon on my Reddit homepage was from r/conspiracy-a large and sometimes dicey community where truly anything goes, the wilder the theory the better. In 2018, Reddit and Facebook both had QAnon-related groups with numbers in the tens of thousands. Read: The women making conspiracy theories beautiful On Instagram, QAnon theories have been so thoroughly laundered and mainstreamed by wellness and lifestyle influencers, they’re almost impossible to separate from aestheticized “sponcon.” But on Reddit, new discussion threads don’t take off, and the major subreddits are gone. Twitter is similarly struggling, despite a significant overhaul to its “coordinated harmful activity” policy that gives the company more latitude to slash-and-burn clusters of QAnon-related accounts. The New York Times speculated last week about whether Facebook “will be locked in an endless fight with QAnon,” as the platform’s latest and most dramatic efforts to slow the movement’s spread through groups with millions of members seem to be failing. They also started posting threats to murder Hillary Clinton, inspired, they said, by their rage over her superhuman ability to make military planes fall out of the sky.

By August of that year, the 70,000 members of r/TheGreatAwakening had misidentified a mass shooter and doxed an innocent person. Reddit is where QAnon first went to attract a mass audience when it left the dark, unnavigable threads of 4chan, and Reddit is where it found a new group of people who were willing to spend hours a day doing “research” and analyzing “clues.” QAnon’s presence on Reddit ballooned throughout 2018. But on Reddit, the movement no longer has any meaningful presence. Last week, new polling showed that nearly half of Americans have now heard of QAnon. But at the time, it was a massive problem on Reddit, where conspiracy-minded members of the Trump-themed subreddit r/The_Donald had long stoked theories such as Pizzagate, and where a QAnon subreddit called r/TheGreatAwakening had racked up 70,000 subscribers, some of whom posted hundreds of times. Two years ago, most Americans knew nothing about QAnon, the ever-growing, diffuse, and violent movement devoted to a loosely connected set of conspiracy theories, most of which tie back to the idea that Donald Trump is leading a holy war against a high-powered cabal of child traffickers, some of whom drink blood.

Qanon meltdown reddit