Network of the Fringe and the Fore: Cross-Platform Link Sharing on QAnon

• In Event: Exploring Right Wing Social Media Sites

Abstract

The QAnon community, once considered a cult on the fringe, is increasingly exerting its power over the mainstream; politicians, mainstream news outlets, and ordinary citizens are accepting the conspiratorial beliefs stemming from the community. Scholars have recently begun to examine how the far-right conspiracy community QAnon expands beyond the echo chambers (Forberg, 2021).
Originating as a virtual community, QAnon has been active across many social media, including mainstream platforms like Facebook and smaller platforms such as Parler. Despite the cross-platform activities of QAnon, less is known about how QAnon is discussed across platforms. One potentially useful way to study this is by examining URLs across social media.

Beyond QAnon supporters, other media actors that do not align with the Q movement nevertheless contribute to QAnon’s publicity. Actors from the mainstream who debunk QAnon conspiracy theories also propagate these theories by embedding QAnon links for debunking purposes. Often, so-called “debunkers” on social media platforms provide a new entry for citizens to learn about conspiracy theories. At the same time, the QAnon community also posts links from mainstream news outlets critical to the community to solidify their in-group membership and act against articles from mainstream news outlets.

Our paper explores the interplay between the QAnon community and the debunkers sharing the same links on social media platforms. We investigate how the same links appeared both on Parler, a platform predominantly used by QAnon supporters, and Facebook, a platform considered a contested environment between QAnon supporters and debunkers. Examining a complex link exchange between the mainstream platform (i.e., Facebook) and the platform on the fringe (i.e., Parler) on QAnon discourses is critical for understanding how both conspiracy theorists and debunkers contribute to the mainstreaming of the conspiracy community across different social media platforms.

To conduct cross-platform analysis, we collected Facebook data through Crowdtangle and obtained Parler data from Aliapoulious et al. (2021). We extracted posts from Facebook and Parler based on the QAnon keyword list (Jackson et al., 2021) from January 2018 to January 2021. After extracting the links from Facebook and Parler, we pulled together 463 links that appeared in both Facebook and Parler.

To examine the cross-platform link sharing related to QAnon discourse, we first performed network analysis. Then, we conducted the content analysis with the 463 links to analyze different types of content that were commonly shared across the two platforms.

Network analysis showed that among accounts and public pages on Facebook and Parler, liberal-leaning, anti-fascist, and anti-racism Facebook pages had the highest connections with other accounts and public pages posting QAnon-related discourses.

We found from the content analysis that links supporting QAnon conspiracies (n = 38) and condemning QAnon conspiracies (n = 100) were shared on Parler and Facebook. Also, links in support of Trump (n = 20) and criticizing Trump (n = 37) were shared on both platforms. About half of the links (46.7%) were in a news format, either from a legitimate news source reporting QAnon group (e.g., NBC) or from an alternative news source (e.g., pedoempire.org) spreading QAnon conspiracy theories.

While the links appeared on both platforms, some were framed dramatically differently depending on which platforms they were shared (Facebook vs. Parler). One of the links that appeared most often on both platforms was an article from NBC titled “Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms.” While the Facebook post utilized the NBC article to express support for Facebook’s moderation policy, a post from Parler used the NBC article to solidify membership of QAnon and accused Facebook’s moderation policy as a form of censorship.

This paper theoretically advances the understanding of how conspiracy theories are differently contextualized based on different social media platforms' unique characteristics in the digital media environment. Methodologically, our paper enhances the understanding of cross-platform patterns of QAnon discourses using various methods, including network analysis of accounts, content analysis of shared links, and qualitative examination of overall posts.

References

Aliapoulios, M., Bevensee, E., Blackburn, J., Bradlyn, B., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., & Zannettou, S. (2021). An early look at the parler online social network. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.03820.

Forberg, P. L. (2021). From the Fringe to the Fore: An Algorithmic Ethnography of the Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Group QAnon. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 1-27.

Jackson, S., Gorman, B., & Nakatsuka, M. (2021). QAnon on Twitter: An overview. Institute for Data, Democracy, & Politics.

Authors

• Sang Jung Kim, University of Iowa

• Porismita Borah

• Yunkang Yang

• Josephine Lukito, University of Texas at Austin

• Jordan Foley, University of Wisconsin-Madison