Conspiratorial, pro-Trump and ready to take up arms ... should we be afraid of the QAnon movement?

They are convinced that an elite is secretly working to disintegrate the world, that it derives sometimes bloodthirsty profits, and that only one bulwark remains against the threat of this new global order: President Donald Trump. Members of the QAnon movement, a group of conspirators primarily working on the Internet in the United States, have been gaining more and more media and social media attention in recent months, both across the Atlantic and in Europe.

On Wednesday, Facebook also announced the withdrawal of nearly 800 groups, 100 pages and 1,500 advertisements directly linked to this movement. "We have seen movements grow which, even if they do not directly organize violence, celebrate violent acts, show they have weapons and suggest they are going to use them, or have fans susceptible to violent behavior. “, Justifies the Californian social network in a press release. Before that, it was Twitter which claimed to have eliminated thousands of QAnon stamped accounts.

QAnon has the particularity of being an informal movement, made up of extremist Internet users who communicate mainly through forums and social networks. To understand his ideology, we have to go back to the fall of 2017, a year after Donald Trump arrived in the White House. That's when a cryptic message appeared on the 4chan forum, signed from an account named Q. A letter that probably refers to the Q authorization, a protocol that allows whoever has it to '' access the most sensitive and secret data of the US state.

Tortured children and criminal democrats

In his message, which paraphrases military language - and becomes almost untranslatable into French - this Q suggests that “extraditions” are to be expected, and that in reaction, “massive riots” would arise. Some, even, would flee the United States. Impossible to know what this "Q" is talking about, or who it is. But for Internet users already adhering to conspiracy theories, it is the beginning of a game of deciphering and eccentric deductions, with sometimes very real consequences.

The main theory that drives these groups is summed up around one observation: according to them, a vast pedophile network - or child eater or even torturing children, it is according to - global satanic has maintained power for decades. This network, nicknamed "the deep state", is said to be made up of disgraced democratic figures from the far right, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as Hollywood personalities, or even powerful leaders whose names are frequently associated with theses of the kind, like the financier George Soros or the rich Rothschild family.

John of God had a sex slave farm and sold their babies.

Meanwhile Oprah Winfrey was selling him to us as a saint and as her spiritual guru. #PEDOPHILES AND CANNIBAL PEDOVORES‼ ️🤮🤮🕳🕳🐀🐀🧹 # LeGrandÉveil # WWG1WGA pic.twitter.com/ELJBOyrqMo

In cryptic "Q" messages, which swarm across a bunch of forums like 8chan (now 8kun), a portal popular with extremist activists, QAnon supporters say they read a bunch of truths hidden by the establishment : the 11th. September would never have happened, all American presidents (before Donald Trump) were involved in pedophile networks and close to pharmaceutical company plots, Kim Jong-un is a pawn placed by the CIA, many Democratic figures are in fact criminals wearing electronic bracelets because they were secretly arrested, Angela Merkel is Adolf Hitler's secret granddaughter… You can find everything there.

A fight "against Satan"

"This movement is about recoveries, sponges for conspiracy theories", summarizes Tristan Mendès France, lecturer at the University of Paris, specializing in digital culture. “We even speak of metacomplotists, omnicomplotists. »Many keywords and concepts are found in their messages. “There is 5G, wi-fi, Bill Gates, Soros… And it can go back to the 17th century with the Illuminati. It forms a cloud of conspiratorial keywords which makes no sense, and which clearly shows that there is no established canon (an ideological base, Editor's note), that it is more an operating mode of thought », Develops the academic, who goes so far as to describe a real« mystique »QAnon.

Even the identity of "Q" is the subject of speculation among his own followers. Some suggest that it would be John F. Kennedy Jr. (the son of the former US president), who allegedly staged his death in an air crash in 1999 to secretly work to overthrow this elite. Others imagine that it is Donald Trump himself - the "Christ figure" of the movement, comments Tristan Mendès France.

Newsletter - Most of the news

I'm registering

Your email address is collected by Le Parisien to enable you to receive our news and commercial offers. Learn more

"Q is a patriot", moreover assured Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican candidate in a district of the State of Georgia in the congressional elections next fall. “We are facing a unique opportunity to kick out this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, and I think we have the right president to do it,” she said.

A threat to internal security

The threat of QAnon, a fringe on the far right and on the internet, could well manifest itself off the screens. First on the political level. In the United States, around fifty QAnon supporters have run for office or are still in the running for local or national elections (like Marjorie Taylor Greene), according to the Washington Post. In Donald Trump's rallies, activists sometimes display posters or T-shirts mentioning the letter "Q".

The president seems to support them: his Twitter account, as well as those of his entourage, have relayed many content from this sphere. “I don't know much about them. I understood that they like me a lot, which I appreciate, ”he also commented on Wednesday.

Yet located on the fringe of the extremist fringe (according to the Pew Research Center, 75% of Americans do not even know what QAnon is), the movement is also worrying on the security front. In a report dated May 2019 and unveiled by Yahoo News, the FBI believes that the group poses a threat to homeland security - just like terrorists. "These conspiracy theories are very likely to emerge, spread and evolve in the modern information market, occasionally pushing extremist groups and individuals to commit criminal or violent acts," perhaps we read there.

The new impetus of the Covid-19

The American federal police were also worried about the momentum that the movement could take on the eve of the presidential elections in November 2020. However, it had not predicted that generated by the Covid-19 pandemic: during confinement, the number membership increased by 600% in the ten English-speaking Facebook groups dedicated to the subject.

The popularity of conspiratorial groups promoting #QAnon has exploded on Facebook and Instagram since the lockdown began. ⤵️ https://t.co/xC2cO7xoI9

The pandemic has indeed reactivated a whole new tissue of unfounded beliefs in these circles: there are those who do not believe in the existence of the virus, those who refuse to wear a mask, or even those who suspect the vaccine developed. by the Bill and Miranda Gates Foundation for wanting to implant chips on their patients.

This movement does not stop at the American borders. A Canadian researcher found a myriad of European QAnon channels on the Telegram social network, which translate content from others. The largest network, according to him, is German, and hosts at least 116,000 members.

The largest QAnon Channel is German, and has 116,000 members in it at the moment.

For Tristan Mendès France, Europe is QAnon's new “crusade” ground. “Today, the QAnons that we see in France, in Germany or elsewhere also absorb the local context: a QAnon France account which was recently deleted obviously had Trump as its hero, but targeted the local enemy, which is Macron ”, explains the specialist.

Only the online platforms where this content is transmitted (such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or even Discord) seem to have the power to limit the impact of their propaganda, by deleting accounts and pages disseminating them. “The platforms try to reduce the fire a little bit, so that new people don't fall into it. For those who believe in these things, the discussion will not change anything. Their religion is made ”, notes Tristan Mendès France, who admits to having debated a lot - in vain - with several members of these communities. “It's like a sectarian movement: when you're in it, it's very difficult to get out. "

The stakes are also major for the Internet giants: it is a question of avoiding the fiasco of the American elections of 2016, where they were accused of having encouraged the push of false information in extremist circles. A phenomenon that would have favored the arrival of Trump to power.