
What is QAnon? Explaining the bizarre rightwing conspiracy theory - Ours90
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/30/qanon-4chan-rightwing-conspiracy-theory-explained-trump
======
api
I do think QAnon is something more than just some basement dweller or troll.
There's just a little bit too much of it and there are too many cases where
it's seemed to have information ahead of time that few could have possessed.

It's clearly some kind of propaganda operation, but being anonymous it could
be literally anyone. It could be any intelligence agency on Earth, any think
tank or political PR company, any radical group, or even Trump's own people.

Unfortunately most of these 'alt' types who think they're too smart and savvy
to believe anything in the mainstream merely switch from mindlessly believing
the MSM to mindlessly believing anything 'alt' that blows the right dog
whistles. They won't trust the news but they will trust an anonymous serial
poster on an imageboard. Somehow the fact that the 'alt' media and its orbit
are just another kind of _media_ with its own set of agendas is lost on them.

In a world saturated with propaganda where any kind of hoax with any kind of
text, audio, or video evidence can be manufactured the provenance of
information becomes critical. If information has no provenance it may as well
not exist unless you have a large amount of other evidence to corroborate it.
In other words rumors are noise unless there's enough independent evidence to
render them redundant. There's a saying in the intelligence world about this:
"interesting if true." It's said of things that probably are _not_ true and
require extensive verification.

This becomes doubly important when you consider priming effects. If I tell you
Donald Trump has AIDS (I just made that up on the spot as a random example),
all the sudden your brain will start looking for and cherry picking evidence
for this possibility. Is his occasional rambling a side effect of anti-HIV
drugs? Is his hair loss a result of those same medications? The mind will run
away with it. We are pattern recognition machines.

I think priming like this is part of the QAnon act. He/she/it throws out a lot
of BS and occasional nuggets of truth -- because disinformation is not
effective without some truth to bait the hook -- and then relies on your brain
to fill in the gaps. I'm sure QAnon is monitoring those same imageboards and
forums where it drops its info and where it's discussed, so it uses its fans
to crowdsource its own material and close the feedback loop.

~~~
nickthemagicman
My boss really believes in this qanon person and loves Alex Jones and I'm
trying to understand why.

You mentioned there's info qanon had ahead if time.

Any examples of this you would mind providing?

~~~
api
I don't have any off the cuff but examples I've heard include future newspaper
headlines and policy announcements. This leads me to suspect that QAnon is
managed by Trump's organization or those closely allied with it, perhaps with
or without the knowledge of Trump himself.

I'll offer my own take on the appeal of these things.

Implausible conspiracy theories have appeal today because our authorities have
collectively done too many things that erode public trust in them. Specific
examples include the Iraq war and its false pretense, the inequitable and
likely corrupt bank bailout following the 2008 financial crisis, and
significant neglect of the economic well being of large numbers of people and
(perhaps more importantly) large geographic areas of the country.

When people lose faith in existing authorities they start asking who they can
trust. Demagogues tend to emerge that offer easy answers and scapegoats.

IMHO the ultimate blame for all this falls on our establishments including our
government, media, and elite educational institutions. Trust is hard to earn
and easy to squander. Decades of greed and incompetence are threatening the
trust basis of our entire society.

------
heywire
The podcast Reply All had an episode on this as well.

