The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
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Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#2As someone with a family member who is falling into this non-sense, I will tell you it is extremely dangerous.
We essentially have some teenager on 4chan trolling an entire audience of probably hundreds of thousands of individuals. They now believe Trump is our savior and the deep state wants to take him down. There are violent undertones to the entire conspiracy and I do worry they are going to turn into terrorists.
Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#3Okay, but why is this theory so different? There are lots and lots of conspiracy theories from every corner of the political sphere. Why is this one a real security threat?
Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#4One 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.
Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#5Okay, but why is this theory so different? There are lots and lots of conspiracy theories from every corner of the political sphere. Why is this one a real security threat?
From the abstract of the article, literally the first paragraph:
Abstract: The QAnon conspiracy theory, which emerged in 2017, has
quickly risen to prominence in the United States. A survey of cases
of individuals who have allegedly or apparently been radicalized to
criminal acts with a nexus to violence by QAnon, including one case
that saw a guilty plea on a terrorism charge, makes clear that QAnon
represents a public security threat with the potential in the future
to become a more impactful domestic terror threat.Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#6Okay, but why is this theory so different? There are lots and lots of conspiracy theories from every corner of the political sphere. Why is this one a real security threat?
This already happened because of QAnon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sente...
These people see a powerful satanic child raping cabal of power that run things from the shadows. Their champion is Donald Trump, if he were to lose this election it's not a reach to see an uptick in these sorts of attacks. Because, honestly, if this conspiracy were true, the only moral thing to do would be to oppose it.
Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#7Compare "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964)
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
with examples from 1797 onward.
Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#8For discussion, I advance a hypothesis that's occurred to me: at least some of the same people are behind both QAnon and c19study.com. I don't have hard evidence of this, but in looking at the social graphs around the c19study Twitter accounts, I see significant QAnon representation (the account @LynnFynn3 shows prominently in the intersection of the two).
Like QAnon, the people behind c19study are very careful to hide their true identities. I find it plausible that they're marketing the same basic stuff to different audiences, c19 to people who fall for stuff that sounds like science that isn't.
Of course, there's another explanation for the overlap, that people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories promoted by anonymous instigators are likely to buy into both. This hypothesis is consistent with them being completely separate, just using similar tactics.
I have a pretty good idea who the coder is behind the c19 site. If you're a reporter who would find this useful, or somebody who is better than me at tracking this stuff down, feel free to get in touch. (Note: other people, including Brian Krebs, have had a crack at this)
Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#9Okay, but why is this theory so different? There are lots and lots of conspiracy theories from every corner of the political sphere. Why is this one a real security threat?
Because QAnon is also a religious movement.
"Trust the plan" is not something conspiracy theorists from the 80s and 90s said...
Re: The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?
#10Okay, but why is this theory so different? There are lots and lots of conspiracy theories from every corner of the political sphere. Why is this one a real security threat?
The attacker at the Prime Minister residence in Canada was driven by Qanon
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/5dzkbx/canadian-politicia...