No Parler? No problem: Where Trump’s QAnon Twitter mob went next

Banished from Twitter and Facebook, the more extreme end of the Donald’s believers found an accommodating home in Parler: until it got shut down. But that doesn’t mean they’re out of options. Far from it, says Jack Kessler
Michelle Thompson
Jack Kessler @jackkessler111 February 2021

'You cannot threaten to kill anyone in the comment section. Sorry,’ explained Parler’s since-terminated chief executive, John Matze, in a post. I mention this upfront to dispel the myth that there were no rules on Parler, the conservative ‘free speech’ internet platform and right-wing alternative to Twitter. There was, however, no directive specifically stating its users should not use the site to organise a violent insurrection on the United States Capitol. In retrospect, this feels like an oversight. Parler, founded by Nevada-based Matze and Jared Thomson, and financed by the conservative billionaire Mercer family, launched in 2018. It has now emerged that Donald Trump’s team was in negotiations to make Parler the former president’s primary social network in return for equity, which perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise: it rapidly gained in popularity last year after Twitter and Facebook began slapping warning labels on some of the then-president’s tweets about election security alongside other disinformation.

Parler became a home not just for right-wing debate, but for believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory. It’s unhelpful to call QAnon a singular conspiracy theory because it is more of a cesspool that gobbles up scores of seemingly unrelated and occasionally contradictory hypotheses. But at its core you will find a belief that Donald Trump is working to dismantle a global network of elite paedophilic, cannibalistic Satanists.

While QAnon is perceived to be largely an American phenomenon, it has followers around the world including Jack Kidd, the brother of model Jodie and a former professional polo player. And while the prophesies of ‘Q’, its anonymous leader, repeatedly fail to come to pass, there are still hordes of true believers who are angry, armed and trusting in ‘The Plan’. But where do they go from here?

Trump Supporters Hold "Stop The Steal" Rally In DC Amid Ratification Of Presidential Election
Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley, known as the QAnon Shaman
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In the days following the Capitol attack, Facebook and Twitter suspended Trump from their platforms, while Parler was effectively taken offline altogether by Amazon Web Services (AWS), a major provider of web-hosting services. For many on the right, Twitter’s move confirmed their belief that Silicon Valley giants were hopelessly biased against conservative principles.

‘When Parler was dropped by AWS, it was, “Oh crap, where do we all go?”’ says Diara J Townes, an investigative researcher with First Draft, a project to protect communities from misinformation. The fracturing had begun and everyone from run-of-the-mill conservatives to rifled militiamen were looking for a new place to hang.

Despite the loss of Parler, the right is spoiled for choice when it comes to social networks tailored to their tastes. New social media platforms include MeWe and Gab. If you want the security of private messaging with end-to-end encryption, go for Wire or Signal. Yet none has quite the same hold on the collective imagination as Parler. At least not yet.

In recent weeks CloutHub, a social network that promises to return ‘power to the people’, reported a significant uptick in users. Gab’s chief executive, Andrew Torba, claimed traffic to his platform had leapt 40 per cent on the day of the Capitol attack. Gab, which launched publicly in 2017, has since become popular with the far-right and was previously best known for being the site frequented by Robert Bowers, who in 2018 opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing 11 people and citing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people were complicit in a white genocide.

Trump Supporters Hold "Stop The Steal" Rally In DC Amid Ratification Of Presidential Election
Trump supporters inside the Capitol
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On 11 January, Megan Squire, professor of computer science at Elon University and online extremism expert, noticed one of the channels on Telegram operated by the Proud Boys, a far-right, fascist group with a history of violence, had grown by nearly 6,000 users in four hours. She says white supremacist groups love such platforms because they are the perfect tool for hate and tick a range of boxes: they offer encryption and a ‘file storage’ feature, which allows groups to store e-books, videos and instruction manuals in what Squire calls ‘easy-to-use propaganda libraries’.

There are downsides to this fragmentation from a far-right perspective. The less QAnon and far-right content that appears on Facebook and Twitter, the less the general public gets to see. Yet the upsides of smaller, niche sites are clear. With little or no content moderation, plus end-to-end encryption, militia groups are waiting, out of sight, to radicalise many others.

Now let’s imagine murder is organised by telephone. Professor Plum is paid £50 to take out Colonel Mustard with a candlestick. In the ballroom. Should the phone company be held responsible for the crime? After all, it was organised using its technology. Instinctively and legally, the answer is no. That same logic gets applied to social media platforms. That is the effect of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the US law that grants internet platforms such as social media companies immunity from what their users post. Facebook employs thousands of people around the world to moderate the content that appears on its site, yet it declined for years to censor Trump. After the Capitol insurrection, both it and Twitter finally suspended him. What took them so long, and why did they finally act when they did?

Pro-Trump Protesters Gather At State Capitols Across The Nation On Day Of Electoral College Ratification
Members of the Proud Boys join Donald Trump supporters
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In answering the former, Bart Cammaerts, professor of politics and communication at LSE points to the misalignment between revenue models and corporate responsibility: ‘Right-wing activists create a lot of clicks and opportunity for targeting. But there’s a discrepancy between what is commercially in their interest and their responsibility.’

Discontent with the lax moderation practices of social media giants has been brewing for years. Mainstream platforms such as Facebook and YouTube stand accused of fine-tuning a business model largely based on keeping users on their sites for as long as possible, impervious to whether they are fomenting hate speech or wishing grandma a happy birthday. Then there is the small matter of the incoming administration of President Joe Biden. There is no incentive to self-regulate quite like the credible threat of government action. Yet where the telephone analogy falls down is that a call, unlike a social media network, has no algorithm working flat out to come up with new and exciting ways to keep you on the phone.

Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher and co-host of the podcast QAnon Anonymous, says that the addictive nature of social media and the algorithms that keep people on it place greater responsibility on social media platforms to moderate their sites better. ‘Content recommendation algorithms work on the assumption that if you like one piece of content, you might want another that’s a bit edgier,’ he says. ‘This is fine if you’re watching skateboarding, but if it’s right-wing videos it can quickly take you from “social justice warriors are irritating” to “the Government is illegitimate and must be overthrown”.’

Indeed, QAnon is a cult centred on creating engaging content. The principle being if they can get you in front of the right tweet or video, you can finally see truth. If you are a social media company, it is anathema to discourage an organisation that champions content production. Until of course things go too far. A little insurrectionism may be good for Q2 click-through rates, but the end of democracy generates a little too much investor uncertainty. The big platforms may be starting to take action but the question remains: what happens to a conspiracy theory, and to the people who buy into it, when it is proven false?

‘Trust the plan’ is the phrase you will read across the QAnon universe. That shibboleth became harder to sustain at 12.01pm on 20 January when Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. This was not supposed to happen. Even in the hours before his inauguration, the believers kept the faith. Some are now coming to terms with the unpleasant mundanity of reality. Others have lost faith in QAnon but maintain their belief system about a deep state of paedophiles. Many are staying the course and remain ready to act on what they see as Trump’s order (even if that means they now have to wait, given recent reports of him being relaxed and happily off Twitter at Mar-a-Lago). On the website greatawakening.win, one user wrote: ‘I just want Geotus to tell us what the f*** to do next. Literally if he just said today to stand back and stand by like in the first debate, I’d be completely contempt [sic]. I’m a soldier with no orders.’ For the uninitiated, ‘Geotus’ stands for ‘God Emperor of the United States’. Another concluded meekly: ‘I’m all about “trust the plan” because we literally have nothing else.’

Yet there may be one group more dangerous than those who still trust the plan: those who have given up. For what is their next move? Disillusioned QAnon followers, freed from the relative boundaries of Facebook and even Parler, are fertile ground for militias and white supremacists. ‘Militant groups like Christian Identity, Boogaloo and neo-Nazis will start to recruit from the pool of QAnon followers,’ says Travis View. Parler may be gone but the demand is unabated. From 6 to 10 January, before its deplatforming, Parler was downloaded nearly one million times from either Google Play or the Apple App Store, according to analytics company Sensor Tower, more than a 1,000 per cent increase from the previous five days.

What is clear is that while the mob failed at preventing a President Biden, it has not gone away. And while QAnon’s prophesies keep failing to materialise, plenty of Trump’s followers still ‘trust the plan’ and are awaiting their instructions.

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