Why did the conspiracy-theoretic group 'QAnon' leave Reddit on the giant bulletin board?

by Mike MacKenzie

' QAnon ' is a group of American conspiracy theorists whose roots are posted by 4chan , an anonymous image board overseas, and spreads conspiracy theories on Facebook and Twitter . Such QAnon also expanded to Reddit on overseas bulletin boards around 2018, but at the time of article creation, QAnon was already away from Reddit, and overseas media The Atlantic took measures against QAnon by Reddit etc. Is summarized.

Why QAnon Left Reddit --The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/09/reddit-qanon-ban-evasion-policy-moderation-facebook/616442/

The spread of conspiracy theories and fake news on the Internet has been a problem, and many of its members are known to be enthusiastic supporters of President Donald Trump . A minority of Americans knew about QAnon in early 2018, but a 2020 survey showed that nearly half of Americans had heard of QAnon.

Countermeasures against QAnon have become a major issue in various parts of the Internet, and the New York Times stated in a September 2020 article that it would be difficult for Facebook to completely expel QAnon from the platform. .. There are millions of QAnon members on Facebook, and even a large-scale attempt to crack down on the spread of the QAnon movement has not been successful at the time of writing the article. Similarly, QAnon's activities are seen as a problem on Twitter and Instagram.

When QAnon expanded to places other than 4chan around 2018, Facebook, which has a large number of users, and Reddit, an overseas bulletin board, were selected as 'places that attract people's attention.' Reddit, where many users could spend time investigating conspiracy theories and analyzing evidence, was a convenient place for QAnon to develop conspiracy theories, with tens of thousands of users related to QAnon in 2018. I was participating in the subreddit (thread) of.

Users also argued in a thread about ' Pizzagate ' about the conspiracy theory that ' Hillary Clinton 's people are involved in trafficking and child sexual abuse,' and even posted threats to Clinton. But as of 2020, you'll rarely see any posts about QAnon on Reddit.

Although there is a post about QAnon the thread on the 'conspiracy theory', most attention collected What is 'I want to believe ...... Q-ANON, honestly bullshit's speaking' that the post is, somehow on Reddit Then, QAnon's activity has calmed down. 'Reddit has a lot of problems, but QAnon isn't one of them,' The Atlantic said of the phenomenon.

The case of Reddit may be useful for other platforms that are struggling to deal with QAnon, but it seems that Reddit can not explain in detail why QAnon's activities were settled on Reddit. 'I don't think we've put any effort into separating QAnon from the platform,' said Chris Slowe, Reddit's Chief Technology Officer. Slowe suspects that Reddit users are more skeptical than other online people and have a discerning eye on online lies that may have prevented QAnon from thriving on Reddit. It is said that there is.

But that doesn't mean Reddit didn't do QAnon at all. QAnon started expanding into Reddit around 2018, but shortly thereafter, in March 2018, Reddit shut down the main QAnon-related thread, 'r / CBTS_stream.' It seems that 20,000 people participated in this thread, but it was said that inciting violence and exposing people's personal information was regarded as a problem.

In September 2018, another major thread, 'r / The Great Awakening,' was banned at the same time as 17 other threads. Only a handful of threads remained after that, and most of the users who joined the threads were inactive. The last thread, 'r / Pedogate,' which was relatively powerful, was also shut down in September 2020. 'It doesn't matter what they believe, but they've started harassing other users we're banning,' Slowe said of why Reddit moved to eliminate QAnon. I will.

One of the reasons for the success of Reddit's efforts is that 'QAnon dealt with it offline before it gained power.' QAnon wasn't a big force on Reddit because it worked before the QAnon community on Reddit became too big to deal with.

It has also been pointed out that the Reddit structure itself, which is unique to bulletin boards and 'talks about one topic on a thread,' also helped to deal with QAnon. Conversations on Reddit are open to all users, but you won't know them unless you're interested in the thread and read through the post. It doesn't have hashtags or retweets like Facebook and Twitter, so it's unlikely to affect outside the thread.

In addition, although Reddit is often accused of being loosely regulated on the platform, it has a higher degree of freedom of execution than other platforms in some respects. Reddit prohibits users whose accounts have been suspended from recreating their accounts and returning to the platform, as well as re-establishing imitation threads for threads that have been shut down. After major measures, such as shutting down major threads, Slowe said a few weeks of surveillance teams have been patrolling the platform to see if there are any signs of malicious threads being recreated. thing.

The fact that 'the activities that QAnon itself carried out were contrary to Reddit's strong philosophy' is also cited as the reason why QAnon did not prosper on Reddit. While Reddit was founded as a 'place for anonymous discussions', anonymity has become a central value of the platform, but QAnon promotes ' doxing ' that exposes people's personal information. Compared to other platforms, Reddit was more sensitive to bleaching, and QAnon's efforts to disclose information about its hostiles were strongly repelled.

It can be inferred that QAnon did not thrive on Reddit for the reasons mentioned above, but 'the peculiarities and culture of Reddit, the timing of eliminating QAnon cannot be reproduced on other platforms,' said The Atlantic, similar to Reddit. Pointed out that this effort is not possible on other platforms.