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The Q appeared in the assault on the Capitol in Washington DC on Wednesday afternoon.
Among the crowd that stormed the seat of the United States Congress were people who identified with him. QAnon movement, as evidenced by the photos and videos.
Several prominent activists of this ideological stream were seen inside the building, while others carried banners with the Q inside and outside the compound.
It’s a group that consider President Donald Trump a hero, despite the fact that he did not express his support and only described these activists as “people who love” their country.
But what is QAnon and who are his followers?
In essence, QAnon is a limit very developed and completely unfounded which says that President Trump is waging a secret war against pedophiles in the US government, corporate and media elites who worship Satan.
Those who believe in QAnon have speculated that this fight one day leads to a calculation in which political figures like former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed.
This is the basis of the movement, but there are so many derivations and internal debates that the total list of QAnon’s claims is enormous and often contradictory.
Followers of these theories look to news, historical facts, and numerology to develop their own implausible conclusions.
In October 2017, a Anonymous user published a series of articles on the 4chan site. I signed them as a “Q” and claimed to have a US security clearance level called “Q authorization”.
These messages were known as “Q drops” or also “breadcrumbs” and were often written in cryptic language interspersed with slogans, promises and images of Trump.
This movement has thousands of followers.
To have increased your traffic on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, since 2017, and there are indications that the numbers have risen further during the covid-19 pandemic.
In response, major internet companies have tightened their rules on QAnon content and removed hundreds of Q-related accounts and videos.
But on social media and in polls, it’s becoming clear that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who believe some of QAnon’s weird theories.
And their popularity has not been diminished by events that seem to discredit them. For example, Special Advocate Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian intervention in the 2016 US presidential campaign.
Supporters of QAnon claimed the Mueller investigation was actually a pretext for a pedophilia investigation. When it ended without an explosive revelation, the attention of conspiracy theorists was diverted elsewhere.
QAnon supporters push hashtags on social networks and coordinate attacks against adversaries: politicians, celebrities and journalists whom they accuse of covering up pedophiles.
It’s not just about online messaging. Twitter says it took action against QAnon because of potential “offline damage”.
Several QAnon believers have been arrested after making threats or actions in person. In a 2018 case, a heavily armed man, Matthew Wright, blocked a Hoover Dam bridge near Las Vegas. He then pleaded guilty to one count of terrorism.
A September 2020 Pew Research Center study found that nearly half of Americans had heard of QAnon, twice as much as six months earlier.
Of those who had heard of this group, a fifth had a positive opinion of the movement. And for many believers, QAnon is President Trump’s base of support.
Sabindolo o no, Trump retweeted messages from QAnon supporters And, ahead of the 2020 election, her son Eric Trump posted a QAnon meme on Instagram.
Although this is a phenomenon of the United States, QAnon’s ideas have had an influence in Latin America as well.
The Costa Rican newspaper La Nacin, for example, published in 2020 a survey on the page “QAnon Costa Rica”, created on June 28 of last year with thousands of followers in this Central American country.
There is also the group “Q Anon in Argentina”, created a few weeks after the Costa Rican page, on July 14, 2020, with also several thousand followers.
And a quick Facebook search also reveals “QAnon groups” in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Brazil and Uruguay, where they talk not only about politics, but also vaccines, climate change and the disease. severity of the coronavirus pandemic. .
Milthon Agero, a Peruvian member of the “Qanon Latinoamrica” group, said last August that what is shared in these groups is not fake news or conspiracy theories, but “alternative information” to “official media”, which this 32-year-old publicist said he did not believe.
“I practice naturopathic nutrition and natural medicine and for years I didn’t trust traditional pharmacological medicine. So, looking for alternative information, I came across this group in late March, early April.” , Agero told BBC Mundo.
But for Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, QAnon is a particularly corrosive conspiracy theory because it leads people to assume that almost all authority figures “are part of a secret clique that works against freedom.”
“The resulting corrosion is the danger of not trusting any institutionZuckerman said in a recent edition of the BBC program Investigation dedicated to QAnon.
“And this mistrust, if exploited by an authoritarian ruler, is incredibly dangerous,” he concludes.
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