There has been concern about the proliferation of the “QAnon” conspiracy theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative propagated on the world’s largest social media platform. Thus, the present research analyzed content generated by 2,813 Facebook pages and groups that contributed to promoting the conspiracy narrative between 2017 and 2020. The result demonstrated that activities of QAnon pages and groups started a significant surge months before the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. We found that these pages and groups increasingly relied on internal sources, i.e., Facebook accounts or their content on the platform, while their dependence on external information sources decreased continuously since 2017. It was also found that QAnon posts based on the Facebook internal sources attracted significantly more shares, comments, and reactions compared with other QAnon posts. These findings suggest that QAnon pages and groups increasingly isolated themselves from sources outside Facebook while having more internal interactions within the platform, and the endogenous creation and circulation of disinformation might play a significant role in boosting the influence of the misleading narrative within Facebook. The findings imply that the efforts to tackle down disinformation on social media should target not only the cross-platform infiltration of falsehood but also the intra-platform production and propagation of disinformation.

Online platforms are increasingly being held to account for the content that their users post. Regulation of content has long been a secondary concern of platforms, but more recently as platforms focus on their content governance, they have typically drawn their regulatory model from offline legal frameworks built around sanctioning and punishment of rule violators. This study approaches these problems using an alternative approach, also drawn from legal scholarship, that is based upon motivating voluntary rule following by emphasizing the fairness of platform rules and the justice of the processes used to communicate content moderation decisions. Using a survey (n=10,487) sent to rule violators on Twitter paired with an analysis of participants’ platform behaviors, this study looks at the relationship between people’s judgments of the procedural justice of an enforcement action and the participants’ likelihood of reoffending in the future. We find that those who felt more fairly treated during their enforcement were less likely to recidivate (beta = -.05, p < .001). This, along with the study’s other findings, indicates an opportunity for platforms to put a stronger focus on people’s experience with enforcement systems as a potential pathway for reducing recidivism.

There has been concern about the proliferation of the "QAnon" conspiracy theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative propagated on the world's largest social media platform. Thus, the present research analyzed content generated by 2,813 Facebook pages and groups that contributed to promoting the conspiracy narrative between 2017 and 2020. The result demonstrated that activities of QAnon pages and groups started a significant surge months before the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. We found that these pages and groups increasingly relied on internal sources, i.e., Facebook accounts or their content on the platform, while their dependence on external information sources decreased continuously since 2017. It was also found that QAnon posts based on the Facebook internal sources attracted significantly more shares and comments compared with other QAnon posts. These findings suggest that QAnon pages and groups increasingly isolated themselves from sources outside Facebook while having more internal interactions within the platform, and the endogenous creation and circulation of disinformation might play a significant role in boosting the influence of the misleading narrative within Facebook. The findings imply that the efforts to tackle disinformation on social media should target not only the cross-platform infiltration of falsehood but also the intra-platform production and propagation of disinformation.

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