Rise of QAnon: A Mental Model of Good and Evil Stews in an Echochamber

Understand

The QAnon conspiracy posits that Satan-worshiping Democrats operate a covert child sex-trafficking operation, which Donald Trump is destined to expose and annihilate.

• Emblematic of the ease with which political misconceptions can spread through social media, QAnon originated in late 2017 and rapidly grew to shape the political beliefs of millions.
• To illuminate the process by which a conspiracy theory spreads, we report two computational studies examining the social network structure and semantic content of tweets produced by users central to the early QAnon network on Twitter.
• Using data mined in the summer of 2018, we examined over 800,000 tweets about QAnon made by about 100,000 users.