The week QAnon went mainstream

The recent news also feels like a clear example of the real-world consequences of our broken information ecosystem. QAnon’s rise is the direct result of a world in which media and politics are distorted by the dizzying scale of social networks, by their lack of adequate content moderation, and by the gaming of algorithms and hashtags. While the social media platforms didn’t create QAnon, they created the conditions for it to thrive. One can draw a straight line from these companies’ decisions — or, more accurately, their inaction — to where we are today…

Facebook’s recommendations systems, designed to prioritize the growth of groups, most likely supercharged the QAnon community — exposing scores of people to the conspiracy theory and then forging bonds among like-minded believers who could communicate, organize and spread their message further. As NBC News’s Ben Collins notes, this spread has intensified during the coronavirus pandemic as QAnon has become a hub for public health misinformation on Facebook. According to The Wall Street Journal, “the average membership in 10 large public QAnon Facebook groups swelled by nearly 600 percent from March through July, to about 40,000 from about 6,000.”

QAnon followed a similar growth strategy on platforms like YouTube, building channels around influencers savvy enough to game the platform’s recommendation algorithms. On Twitter, the communities formed around the successful manipulation of hashtags, efforts amplified by the Trump campaign and the president’s Twitter feed. (On Friday Mr. Trump refused to answer whether he supported QAnon.)