Tracing normiefication

Zeeuw, Daniël de; Hagen, Sal; Peeters, Stijn; Jokubauskaitė, Emilija

doi:10.5210/fm.v25i11.10643

Cited by 35 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…Typically, users create a thread by posting an image and/or description, and others then can post on that thread with or without images. We focus on 4chan and 8chan/8kun as the conspiracy started on 4chan's /pol/, before moving to 8chan in December 2018 (de Zeeuw et al 2020), which was shut down in August 2019 (Breland 2019) and resurfaced in November 2019 as 8kun. For simplicity, henceforth, we refer to both 8chan/8kun as 8kun.…”

Section: Web Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gospel according to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

Aliapoulios

Papasavva

Ballard

et al. 2022

ICWSM

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The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) blood-thirsty politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By interpreting cryptic “drops” of information from an anonymous insider calling themself Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that Donald Trump is leading them in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been covered extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in multiple violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little understanding of how the theory evolved and spread on the Web, and the role played in that by multiple platforms. To address this gap, we study QAnon from the perspective of “Q” themself. We build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected from six “aggregation sites,” which curate and archive them from their original posting to anonymous and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites have a relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the Q drops’ contents to identify topics of discussion and find statistically significant indications that drops were not authored by a single individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit are used to disseminate Q drops to wider audiences. We find that dissemination was (initially) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the “gospel” of Q persists on the Web.

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Section: Web Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gospel according to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

Aliapoulios

Papasavva

Ballard

et al. 2022

ICWSM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Perhaps closer to our work is the study by Zeeuw et al [14], who collect QAnon-related data between October 2017 and November 2018 from 4chan's /pol/, 8chan's /qresearch/, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and online press articles and comments. Their goal is analyze the evolution of the conspiracy theory from fringe communities to mainstream social networks and news.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Typically, users create a thread by posting an image and/or description, and others then can post on that thread with or without images. We focus on 4chan and 8chan/8kun as the conspiracy started on 4chan's /pol/, before moving to 8chan in December 2018 [14]. 8chan was shut down in August 2019 [31], resurfacing in November 2019 as 8kun.…”

Section: Web Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

Papasavva¹,

Aliapoulios²,

Ballard³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that a cabal of (literally) blood thirsty politicians and media personalities are engaged in a war to destroy society. By interpreting cryptic "drops" of information from an anonymous insider calling themselves Q, adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that they are being led by Donald Trump in an active fight against this cabal. QAnon has been covered extensively by the media, as its adherents have been involved in multiple violent acts, including the January 6th, 2021 seditious storming of the US Capitol building. Nevertheless, we still have relatively little understanding of how the theory evolved and was spread on the Web, and the role played in that by multiple platforms.To address this gap, in this paper we study QAnon from the perspective of "Q" themself. Specifically, we build a dataset of 4,949 canonical Q drops collected from six "aggregation sites," which curate and archive them from their original posting to anonymous and ephemeral image boards. We expose that these sites have relatively low (overall) agreement, and thus at least some Q drops should probably be considered apocryphal. We then analyze the contents of the Q drops themselves, identifying topics of discussion, as well as finding statistically significant indications that drops were not authored by a single individual. Finally, we look at how posts on Reddit are used to disseminate Q drops to a wider audience. We find that dissemination was (originally) limited to a few sub-communities and that, while heavy-handed content moderation decisions have reduced the overall issue, the "gospel" of Q persists on Web communities.

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“…The digital soldiers who make up the QArmy hailed from all over the world, from many different backgrounds with varying technical competencies in visualization and web design. Over the past 4 years, QAnon evolved from a few basic comment threads on 4chan/ pol to a phenomenon that, at its height, pervaded most social media platforms, a process theorized by de Zeeuw et al (2020) as "normiefication" or the normalizing of fringe, born-digital content. QAnon communities popped up on mainstream sites such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube, but much of the organizing and mobilizing around the information war was done on the dark web, in the unpoliced enclaves of 8chan and 8kun, before spilling over into the mainstream Internet.…”

Section: Information Visualizations Data Conspiraciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Zuckerman (2019) analyzes QAnon as an example of what he calls the “emergence of the unreal,” or the notion that reality as such has become a subjective orientation rather than an objective reality due to our contemporary media environments. de Zeeuw et al (2020) trace the global spread of QAnon across platforms, arguing that the theory has become increasingly normalized as it spread onto the mainstream web through sites such as Twitter and YouTube, although such mainstream platforms have begun banning accounts affiliated with QAnon (Conger, 2020; Holmes, 2020). Cosentino (2020) positions QAnon within the global spread of far-right conspiracy theories and toxic ideologies through a specific set of myths, symbols, and codes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization

Hannah

2021

Social Media + Society

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Seeing is believing, so goes the cliché. In our extremely online world, the particular nexus between visual information and political belief has become one of the thorniest challenges to truth. We live in an extremely visual world in which we navigate social media, search engines, platforms, interfaces, icons, memes, and smartphones. Despite the fact that we navigate visual information at an astounding rate, we have not nationally developed literacies to debunk bad information. I argue that we are witnessing a confluence between extremely online, crowd-sourced conspiracies, whose adherents possess a high capacity for online information gathering, and visualization, meant to communicate data about our world effectively and accurately through optical means which has been co-opted for information warfare. Deploying such informatics further legitimates bizarre, unhinged theories about political reality. QAnon, the extremely online conspiracy theory that has cast its shadow over the Internet, relies exclusively on information visualization to communicate its message and is symptomatic of our inability to combat misinformation that mimics the methods of data analysis and information literacy. I argue that QAnon’s success—indeed, its very existence—relies on (at least) two principal factors: (1) QAnon relies, intentionally or no, on a slippage between data and information that obscures the interventions by Q and Q’s anons in leveraging information warfare, and (2) QAnon supports such a slippage with complex and interactive visualizations of bad information, thereby accelerating apophenia, the tendency to see linkages between random events and data points.

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Tracing normiefication

Cited by 35 publications

References 0 publications

The Gospel according to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

The Gospel according to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information

A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization

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