QAnon: How the far-right sect dragged Australians into a “rabbit hole” of extremism | QAnon

VSam Smith, an Australian researcher who monitors far-right activity online, first noticed the mention of QAnon in the local communities he was watching as early as 2018. At the time, it looked like a few “small groups” Facebook dating “of about 20 people,” he told me. “They were talking about ‘Oh, we’ll meet at a pub in Oakleigh, and we’ll talk about this QAnon thing.’ And I didn’t think it would be that important.

Smith’s interest in the local movement was sparked again during times of severe coronavirus-related public health restrictions in Melbourne in 2020. To contain a virus outbreak in Melbourne’s public housing towers, local authorities had acted quickly – and controversially – to unilaterally lock residential communities into buildings. Disregarding the restrictions, a group of QAnon believers traveled nearly 2,000 miles from Queensland to protest the events, filming themselves – and laying out their theories – as they went.

Smith was curious, found a way to access their Facebook groups, and started following their conversations. What he noticed was that Facebook’s algorithm was helping to deliver disturbing content. Smith found that even engagements with Australian Facebook groups that represented softer political positions – like a small anti-vaccine community – quickly pushed him towards extremist content. “The Facebook algorithm was like, ‘I know other things that you might be interested in! ”Smith says, and it has driven users in Australia’s shallow Facebook pool towards much more hardcore political content.

As happened in Germany, QAnon seeded its Australian iteration through the networks of the wellness community. It was a bourgeois place where those who feared “precariousness” came to seek comfort. Community values ​​here are based on promoting opportunities for personal healing through “healthy eating” and radical diets, alternative medicine, meditation, yoga, and new age beliefs. It was also a place where anti-vax conspiracy theories had been lurking for some time and, as the pandemic progressed, has become a ripe channel – online and offline – for QAnon’s influence. . A personal friend described to me how her first encounter with QAnon Believer in Australia resulted from opening a ‘rabbit hole’ for her on Facebook as she researched organic food recommendations for her dog.

Guardian columnist Brigid Delaney – including the 2017 book, Wellmania, charted her adventures in the wellness industry – wrote about the emerging alliance she saw between the wellness and conspiracy communities in a 2020 post. Here she revisits a concept explained for the first time in the 1990s by Michael Kelly in The New Yorker. Kelly had called this “fusion paranoia” and described it as the process of strengthening and connecting that takes place between different movements when they recognize that they share a core belief. During the coronavirus shutdowns, Delaney wrote, that shared core belief was the idea that the virus was “a cover for a conspiracy of totalitarian proportions, designed to stifle freedom of movement, assembly, expression and – at the same time. ‘horror of some in the wellness industry – forcing a mass vaccination program’.

By 2021, those who wanted to believe that QAnonism had mainly spared isolated Australia had more and more evidence to ignore. Australia’s experience with the coronavirus pandemic between 2020 and 2021 has been dominated by a series of continuing lockdowns that have trapped Australians at home with great frustration – and the internet – for months at a time. The preponderance of anecdotal accounts detailing encounters with QAnon online could be seen as unrepresentative of what may have happened in the wider community. The build-up of stats, however, was a much harder boulder to move.

A 2020 article published by the UK think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that after the US, Britain and Canada, Australia is the world’s fourth-largest producer of QAnon content. Australia has created more QAnon content than Russia.

Surprisingly, this had been the case even before the pandemic, with Australians sharing over 105,000 QAnon tweets in the first nine months of the theory’s existence between October 2017 and June 2018. QAnon researcher Marc-André Argentino was monitoring the theory. QAnon activity on 8kun and registered the attendance of six Australian QAnon research committees there in January 2020, hosting 4,000 positions. At the start of 2021, the number of research commissions had risen to 11.

In a February 2021 article, journalist Michael McGowan noted that QAnon’s unique ability to pollinate with other conspiracy theories created a merger paranoia in Australia, not only with anti-vax communities, but protesters as well. anti-locking and anti-migration and anti-Semitic tropes. as a community of anti-5G cell phone towers activists. It was not a negligible number of Australians to influence. An Essential Media poll found 12% of Australians believe 5G towers are being used to spread the coronavirus.

What is behind all these statistics of tweets, cross-pollination, centipedes and web influence are the sad true stories of Australians mourning the loss of loved ones to ‘the Qult’ in places like Reddit’s r / QAnonCasualities community. Statistics could measure the size of QAnon’s transmission in Australia, but unquantifiable anecdotes recorded its cost. QAnon worship was not a phenomenon that only affected abstract and distant people on the Internet. He penetrated families and communities. It hurt workplaces and friendship groups. Including mine.

Meshelle and cults

My friend Meshelle – her real name – had already had a negative encounter with another sect, many years before QAnon entered her life. She had met her partner, Dave, straight out of high school in Brisbane. Married for over 20 years, they had two teenagers and long-term jobs when Meshelle began to suffer from depression. She mentioned to her hairstylist that she had started seeing a therapist, and the hairstylist recommended a weekend hypnotherapy class which she said helped her quit smoking.

Meshelle left for the weekend with the course, and it was a transformative and positive experience. Paying more and more classes with the same provider, she was drawn into a new community that encouraged her to make changes in her life. She quit her job, left her marriage, moved into a place of her own, and started her own hypnotherapy business with a guy from the course who lived interstate, with whom she had started a relationship while on the job. point of leaving Dave. All doubts about his choices were removed, and his new community was eager to help him do so.

Then, one day, she received a phone call from another interstate woman who had also started a hypnotherapy business with Meshelle’s new partner, with whom she was also in a relationship. The woman had come across an intimate email the man was sending to Meshelle. Between the two horrified women, they finally discovered that the partner they shared was shared with no less than 21 other women at the same time.

Meshelle’s barrage of suppressed doubts erupted. She was an intelligent and capable woman, but she had been vulnerable to a need for positivity and encouragement, and she realized that she had been drawn into a cult. She let go of the parallel reality she had joined, reunited with Dave, and returned to the family home. His remonstrances were intense.

Together again, Meshelle and Dave joined a community yoga class, and it was here that she had her second cult experience. When the couple who ran the classes broke up, the yogi husband was left behind and, during the pandemic, became “full QAnon”. Meshelle, Dave and the other students found themselves at the end of a growing barrage of Facebook posts and other communications insisting that to reject the conspiracy theory was to reject yoga itself. People from the class who knew a little about Meshelle’s past came to ask her for advice. “They couldn’t believe that someone they respected had left the planet,” she said. “They were really worried and people came to me upset; he tore them from the bands. Meshelle stood up to the yogi on Facebook and tried to contact him privately. He told her stories from QAnon about pedophiles, kids in tunnels under New York and how “Hillary Clinton is actually in jail and she’s a double walking around.” She realized there was no way to bring him back when he started on “fucking lizards”.

The experience for Meshelle was triggering, she says, not only because of the depth and extremity of the yogi’s new beliefs. These are the women in the yoga class that he saw fall behind him, agreeing with Hillary Clinton and believing in the “lizard people”. The insecurity of these women, she recognized too well. A feeling of precariousness. A need to find a community and to connect. She and Dave had left the class, but in their small suburban community, Meshelle realized she was being frozen by the class members who stayed behind. They looked down and were silent as she walked into the cafe where they were gathering. “I’ve lost friends, definitely,” says Meshelle. She had been shunned.