Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

ctc.usma.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 155 posts

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#111

Post by ipnon »

bsenftner wrote: post #82

This is the result of under funding education, and allowing the boundary between church and state to blur. Those with a religious fairy tale cause and effect understanding of reality, QAnon makes perfect sense. While anyone with a firm foundation in reality sees pure nonsense.

It's important to note that QAnon first appeared on 4chan, not a religious forum. I don't think religiosity is a good explanation for QAnon belief. Religiosity like church attendance is declining in America for instance.

Instead, think of the stereotypical 4chan user. Lonely, asocial, engaged in a meme subculture separate from the mainstream. It's this psychological social distance and lack of identification with the mainstream that is key. This personality type exists throughout American society. My claim is that these people take pure nonsense to heart because they have no firm foundation in reality. They are too plugged in.

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#112

Post by alexilliamson »

commandlinefan wrote: post #109
alexilliamson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not agree that Black lives matter, but it's not a conspiracy theory. With BLM, people are opting in to a social movement rooted in observed police violence. QAnon is not tethered to reality in the slightest.

Well, the BLM movement's theory is that the U.S. government - the police especially - are secretly racist, don't believe black lives matter, and are conspiratorially targeting black people just for being black (in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary). That's not too far away from my understanding of the QAnon conspiracy theory that there's some "secret society" of bilderbergers or illuminati that are pulling t…

I wouldn't characterize it as a belief that the police are secretly racist. More that they are openly and demonstrably racist.

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#113

Post by Wistar »

082349872349872 wrote: post #70
kipchak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a similar amount of shutdown on 5G tower conspiracies after they resulted in vandalization, arson and even a shooting. 17 towers were attacked in New Zeland alone[1] for example, and plenty elsewhere.[2] As a result 5G groups have been banned on Facebook and the like. Things like this that has real impact is for better or worse pretty quickly suppressed on most platforms. If flat earthers started setting…

Does anyone know which vendors' equipment was on the attacked towers?

New Zealand banned Huawei so probably not them although, as recently as Nov 2019, the second-largest NZ operator Spark was intending to use a mix of Nokia, Samsung, Cisco, Ericsson and Huawei equipment.

https://www.mobileworldlive.com/asia/asia-news/new-zealands-...

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#114

Post by dqpb »

aleister_777 wrote: post #12

It seems like the media is talking about this more than anyone else at this point. There have literally been over 2000 articles written to debunk this. The content has been banned from reddit, twitter and other platforms. Why is everyone so vigilant to call it "dangerous"? Why not flat earth and chem trails? Why all the attention for this one thing?

You clearly don't have a believer in your family.

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#115

Post by [deleted] »

082349872349872 wrote: post #70
kipchak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a similar amount of shutdown on 5G tower conspiracies after they resulted in vandalization, arson and even a shooting. 17 towers were attacked in New Zeland alone[1] for example, and plenty elsewhere.[2] As a result 5G groups have been banned on Facebook and the like. Things like this that has real impact is for better or worse pretty quickly suppressed on most platforms. If flat earthers started setting…

Does anyone know which vendors' equipment was on the attacked towers?

[deleted]

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#117

Post by curtis3389 »

dylan604 wrote: post #85
dogman144 wrote: post #4

One has to believe there's a deliberate intelligence effort signal boosting this a fair bit, meshed within the various layers of accounts/platforms propagating it. Similar example of practices: https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2020/07/ghostwr... The above relies on a fair bit of identity building as well, so Q's source/breeding in more anon platforms helps all the better. Intense stuff.

If you flood the world with crazy conspiracy theories, when news breaks of an actual crazy conspiracy, nobody will notice. Raise the noise level in the signal, do your clandestine activities in the open.

Ah, my favorite conspiracy theory. The master conspiracy theory:

All totally crazy conspiracy theories are created by "them" to discredit the real conspiracies.

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#118

Post by m_ke »

dleslie wrote: post #98
m_ke wrote: post #22

A good listen about QAnon: https://youtu.be/lf3xlx9K0DI Big issue with QAnon is that unlike normal standalone conspiracy theories, this one engulfs all other ones into a single plot.

That's really not so different than many previous popular conspiracy theories. Replace QAnon's pedophile elite with one of: - The Catholic Church - Free Masons - Rosicrutians - Illuminati - Jewish Bankers - Satanist Elites - Lizard People - The CIA - UN Globalists w/ Agenda 21 - And so on... What makes a conspiracy theory really _stick_ is when it confounds a _kernel of truth_. The more convincing and defensible that…

I agree, but as mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159257 QAnon has morphed into a master conspiracy to unite all of these crazy groups.

The same people that push Qanon are also pushing anti mask, anti vaccine and etc conspiracies.

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#119

Post by non-entity »

dogman144 wrote: post #4

One has to believe there's a deliberate intelligence effort signal boosting this a fair bit, meshed within the various layers of accounts/platforms propagating it. Similar example of practices: https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2020/07/ghostwr... The above relies on a fair bit of identity building as well, so Q's source/breeding in more anon platforms helps all the better. Intense stuff.

I never really believed the scale at which foreign (or domestic) actors could affect people politically. I thought the idea that ads or social media posts had any significant effect was laughable.

One time, however, I was browsing Twitter, particularly a political thread. It was relatively level-headed (at least as far as social media politics goes) until I saw one reply. Everything about this account was a perfect caricature of what I despised. From the profile pic, to what they retweeted. It was stuff that was genuinely disgusting and most people would be appaled by it.

Their profile said they were a writer at "some website" and I decided to check it out. The site itself was rather boring with multiple articles that really didn't make sense and seemed more like SEO blogspam content, so out of curiosity I did a whois on the domain. The site was originally registered a month prior. The Twitter account was the same age. I realized that this probably wasn't a real person and that I had been successfully baited into being pissed off. Can't say who or what is projecting it, but looking back a lot of accounts I've seen in the replies of Twitter threads are probably the same story.

I had an idea to collect a database of similar accounts, since they seem pretty easy go find, just so I could play around with the data, but ended up not doing anything.

Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

#120

Post by fouric »

> retaining the central belief that a cabal of powerful elites control the world, using their power to covertly abuse children

They're going to need to be more precise about the Pizzagate conspiracy, because the above wording very closely describes the Jeffrey Epstein case, which has been proven to be true.

Post reply on HN