Tracking QAnon: how Trump upended conspiracy-theory research (Nature scientific journal)

[Nevilledog]

Last edited Sat Feb 6, 2021, 07:24 PM - Edit history (1)

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The Q Origins Project
@QOrigins
Well, folks, Nature -- the preeminent scientific journal -- has published on QAnon.

Lots of good stuff in here, especially from @BostonJoan, who has a few *suggestions about what to do* -- which we don't discuss enough, IMO.

Tracking QAnon: how Trump upended conspiracy-theory research
By taking fringe ideas mainstream, the former US president taught new and dangerous lessons about manipulating social and mass media.
nature.com
10:38 AM · Feb 6, 2021

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00257-y

For people around the world, the now-iconic images of a man in a horned headdress roaming the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection came as a shock. For Kate Starbird, the images were frighteningly familiar. ‘QAnon Shaman’ — the online persona of Jacob Anthony Chansley, or Jake Angeli — is a known superspreader of conspiracy theories that her research group has been monitoring for years.

The storming of the Capitol was “this physical manifestation of all of these digital characters we’ve been studying”, says Starbird, a social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who investigates the spread of disinformation on social media. “To see all of that come alive in real time was horrifying, but not surprising.”

Starbird is among a cadre of researchers in the United States and abroad who study the way disinformation and conspiracy theories take root and spread through social and mass media. As US president and a prolific tweeter, Republican Donald Trump turned their research upside down when he helped to push typically fringe theories into the mainstream — most recently by downplaying the coronavirus pandemic and promoting the unfounded claim that the US presidential election had been stolen from him.

With Trump out of office, this group of researchers is now working to make sense of the deluge of data that they’ve collected from platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. It’s been a lesson in modern populism: a world leader amplified once-obscure conspiracy theories, with each tweet and retweet strengthening the ideas and emboldening their supporters. Now, researchers are retooling to understand — and prepare for — what comes next.

*snip*

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Nevilledog]

2. Kicking