From Fortress to Grift-Shop: The Lifecycle of QAnon on Telegram, 2021–2026

• In Event: Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 2. Visibility, disability, & Telegram

Abstract

Platform governance interventions like deplatforming are typically evaluated in their immediate aftermath, before the full trajectory of a movement's response can be observed. This paper presents a five-year longitudinal analysis of the QAnon far-right media ecosystem on Telegram (2021–2026), offering the most comprehensive temporal window on post-deplatforming movement dynamics to date. Drawing on network analysis of 237 channels and Structural Topic Modeling (STM) of approximately 295,000 messages, I identify a four-phase lifecycle: rapid post-ban consolidation, community differentiation, mid-period stabilization, and eventual structural fragmentation. By 2025, the network's largest connected component had collapsed from 100% of active nodes to 32%, and reciprocity dropped to zero — indicating a shift from an interactive community to isolated broadcast silos. Content analysis reveals a striking substantive transformation accompanying this structural decay. While core QAnon ideological discourse remained stable at roughly 28% of the corpus throughout the study period, commercial and parasitic content like cryptocurrency scams, Trump merchandise grift, and health product spam, grew to occupy approximately 32% of the corpus, concentrated in 2024–2025. I term this the "commercialization of grievance": as prophetic credibility wanes, ideologically captive audiences become targets for financial exploitation. Critically, even as internal infrastructure decays, high-betweenness bridge channels continue routing fringe content into more mainstream conservative media, sustaining democratic harm beyond organizational collapse. These findings suggest that platform governance interventions targeting only fringe spaces are insufficient: effective policy must also attend to the aggregator channels and commercial actors that sustain audience capture long after a movement's political project has fragmented.

Author

• Zachary Brown, University of Washington