 Hello everybody. I think it is noon on the dot so just about time for us to get started. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Tori Bosch and I'm the editor of Future Tense. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate Magazine, Arizona State University and New America. And our goal is to explore emerging technologies and the questions that they raise for policy and for society. We do that through a channel on Slate at Slate.com slash Future Tense and these days in online events like this one. This is our first time back after a little bit of a summer break and we'll be here every Wednesday at noon Eastern for the foreseeable future. Today we're here to thread a pretty complicated needle. I think that when I first heard about QAnon several years ago, my initial reaction was that it was a kind of interesting quirky strange thing. But that I didn't really rise to something that we needed to cover as journalists or that social networks needed to worry about too much, largely because I think a lot of us worry about giving oxygen to things. I think though that this idea that we shouldn't cover or shouldn't address QAnon has changed a lot because it's now impossible to deny that the conspiracy theory is having serious real-world effects. Just last night a QAnon supporter won the GOP Senate primary in Delaware. She will certainly not be elected. Nevertheless, it's something a little troubling to see and there will be at least one QAnon supporter in the House of Representatives after this fall. QAnon supporters have been accused of serious crimes including kidnapping and homicide and the FBI considers it a domestic terrorism threat. So, frankly, it seems like the only people who aren't talking about QAnon are conservative Republicans who are trying to dodge questions about it by claiming they haven't heard of it. Today we're here to talk to three experts about QAnon's rise and evolution, how journalists and social networks can may have unwittingly contributed to the rise, and how they can responsibly address it going forward. We'll speak for about 40 minutes before opening up to Q&A, and throughout the conversation you can use the Q&A function on Zoom to submit your questions. So now I'll introduce our esteemed panelists. First we have Whitney Phillips who is an assistant professor at Sarah QC University's Department of Communications and Rhetorical Studies. Whitney also wrote what I think is a sort of definitive piece on this topic for the Guardian in 2018 called How Journalists Should Not Cover an Online Conspiracy Theory. Next we have Alex Haleve who is an associate professor at Arizona State University's School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. His work includes examining online communities in particular Reddit. And then finally we have Ali Breland who is the disinformation reporter for Mother Jones in August here in an article called The Summer QAnon Went Mainstream. So thank you all for being here with us today. Ali I want to start with you. This is a question that could have an extremely long answer but briefly what is QAnon. What is this conspiracy theory that alleges that there is a satanic cabal of elite pedophiles who are running a child sex ring and secret and that they are locked in a battle with President Donald Trump who is also being thwarted by the deep state which is like a sort of hyperbolic term for entrenched government bureaucrats who are unelected who are fighting Donald Trump's efforts to stop this fictional pedophile cabal. And without getting too deeply into the weeds of it it kind of started originally as this conspiracy theory that there was a restaurant in DC that elite liberals were running a child sex ring out of. This is easily debunked but it's sort of on on message boards like 4chan and 8chan warped into this larger conspiracy about just everything I just said in that sprawling world and it's yeah that's the baseline of it like you said it could go on forever. Yes, there are many permutations I think one thing about QAnon that's interesting is it seems like you can sort of believe the parts that you want to believe in which may have helped expand its spread, even internationally as we've seen fairly recently. So, I mean initially how did the social networks respond to QAnon as it began kind of filtering through their systems. So, in the case of Reddit in about 2018, maybe within a few months to like a year after it started Reddit is pretty quick to take down all these sorts of affiliate communities subreddits that were devoted to the conspiracy. It's surprisingly almost I guess not surprisingly given everything we've seen technology companies like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube just kind of stood by and watch it happen over the past two years. And so, initially they didn't really do anything. You can easily see recommendations for QAnon Facebook groups if you touch sort of adjacent territory or join Facebook groups for QAnon like others would pop up the same thing happened on YouTube. And only recently these companies Facebook and Twitter sort of take minor sort of piecemeal steps to curbing the spread of QAnon content but there's a lot of reporting now all the time about how this is just like falling short and not really doing much to sign you to spread of it. Yes, I want to turn to you. I mean I think it's really interesting that Reddit acted so much earlier than other social networks in terms of trying to kind of contain QAnon. Can you tell us maybe why Reddit perhaps acted more quickly and what the response to their action might have been. Hi. So, you know, I think the source of this often is, as Ali said, the image boards and Reddit tends to be the place where it's amplified. And Reddit unfortunately has a long history of amplifying some of these voices in interesting ways. So, I think part of it is that that they had recognized some of these patterns. Which they've been successful in that I think is an open question. So, as of, you know, kind of on an ongoing rolling basis they've been killing off subreddits which are kind of subgroups within Reddit, the same as Facebook groups or something like that, that might have something to do with Q. They've done some, they've made some efforts at going beyond that but, you know, even this week they've killed another sort of anti whatever. They've killed another group that's in somehow in the fringes of the Q movement. And so they made that attempt. But some of this is, I don't know, I wonder how much of the work can be done on the platforms. It's important, I think, so it feels like forest management, right. Forest management is really important to stopping forest fires. And that's kind of gotten lost in the current forest fire piece. It really is. But there's only so much it can do when the climate has changed significantly. And so, I think that is the big piece here, which is I think platforms can do something and they should do something but, as Reddit has shown, Q is still fairly, fairly popular among discussions and so there's only so much you can do to shut it down without actually amplifying it as well. Excuse me, Whitney, you know, of course, journalism is the other part of this equation. I think that user rise has probably depended on journalism almost as much as social networks. So can you talk a little bit about the mistakes you saw as journalists began to cover QAnon two, three years ago. Well, so before I get to that I want to add a little bit about the origin story of QAnon because that speaks to the journalistic responses both good and less good and not good at all. So Pizza Gate emerged that was Hillary Clinton and co were running a satanic child sex ring out of the back of a Washington DC pizza shop I've had to say that line so many times over the last few years I haven't memorized. But Pizza Gate emerged that was in 2016, and that was getting a lot of play at the time. It was part of it was the tail end of the election because it was October. And it happened right around it happened in response to and was really sort of exacerbated by the John Podesta email leak because then people pouring through the WikiLeaks email dump were then seeing what folks were calling evidence of these rings because the reason that that's important is that there could not have been a deep state conspiracy really in the way that it ultimately came to came to be understood because Trump was not yet president. And so Pizza Gate was sort of a confined it wasn't confined it was flooding up against pre existing conspiracy theories most notably the satanic panics of the 80s and 90s. It really wasn't until the Mueller report or the Mueller investigation was opened in May of 2017 that Pizza Gate essentially became retconned into the broader deep state narrative because the concept of deep state had existed. It was a term that was in the world, but it wasn't really until 2017 and Anna Merlin talks about this in her excellent book about conspiracy theories. She talks about how it wasn't really until the Mueller investigation was opened that people then started connecting these dots and so all of the existing energies that had swirled around Pizza Gate and there was quite a lot, then became this story about QAnon as it emerged and watching QAnon unfold over the last few years I wrote a chapter my co author and I Ryan Milner have published a book on this, and we have an entire chapter on conspiracy theories and QAnon. And the, what was happening is that QAnon is kind of amorphous and some really critical ways and so it's been able to absorb and latch on to the energies of unfolding news stories as they've happened. So the Mueller investigation became a source of energy for this, then you had the Epstein revelations was an enormous source of energy for this, then it even was feeding into and fed by impeachment, and then feeding into and fed by COVID and so as we were trying to write this chapter, talking about journalistic coverage of it. All part of the problem is that QAnon has latched itself to everywhere. And that's partly why it's been so hard now especially not to cover it, because it's it's connected to all of the major stories that people are needing to cover. And so you can't really separate out QAnon as it's emerged as not even really a narrative but sort of a worldview, journalistic coverage of the narrative itself, the worldview itself, then all these unfolding news stories that have been impossible to avoid and so it really is. We describe it in the chapter in terms of the hurricane it's sort of a perfect storm of everyday peoples energies, energies of journalists energies of technology companies you can't really tease one thing out from the other. And that's what has made this a uniquely vexing conspiracy theory wrap around worldview paradigm to respond to effectively. Interesting that you compare it to a storm Alex just compared it to a wildfire. You know I think there is this sense that is, it's just this enormous force now that is a little bit challenging to try to try to wrap your arms around and that makes it difficult to think about how we can talk about it responsibly how we can, what we can actually request of social networks short of sort of short of shutting down all together because it's, it's not a game of whack a mole you know all the moles are coming up together so I'm curious to for all of you, like, do you keep any principles in mind as you're approaching do you are there things that you wish journalists and platforms were doing a bit differently in terms of more of the forest management as opposed to responding to the fire. Respond to that and I also want to say that you know journalists are not a monolithic category and some folks have been doing really really great thoughtful work. The entire time, some folks have maybe been feeding into some of the problematic aspects of the story so I don't want to paint, I don't want to say that all journalists are doing X, Y or Z. But I think that not just in regards to Q and on but every problematic polluted story that emerges. I think the number one thing that I wish I saw more of I have, I mean, there, I think that this has become more common. This is good over the last few years but still, I think it's really critical not to lose track of the fact whether we're a journalist whether we're an academic or an everyday person. No one stands outside of the storms that we're describing that you cannot step outside of Q and on and write about it in a detached totally objective way, because just engaging with the discourse is going to be furthering those energies and that's not to say that if you write about Q and on you're necessarily making the problem worse by default, but Q and on sort of thrives off of energy, and anything that gives it energy is going to bring it to new places, and that can, that is ambivalent it could potentially, you know, clear up some questions that folks might have at the time, maybe convincing people who think that you or your reporting or your institution is part of the deep state, and that might just further entrench the belief so we all all of us, even everyday people. We are contributing as we are speaking and keeping that in mind that doesn't mean there's a one size fits all response for how we should do it, but never losing track of that I think it can guide some of our thinking about how we respond if we respond to whom we are, that can at least minimize the amount of pollution that's produced. Just to, I mean, I, I want to divide out this question of what can journalists do to cover Q and on from the broader what can journalists do and I, and I, and I think, as Whitney said, I think there's some journalists doing great work out there but I think there's some systemic issues with journalism that help to feed this. And, and so, you know, honestly, what can journalism journalism do better that could on a systemic level approach this and that is making better use of investigative investigative reporting heavier evidence, checking stories, not relying entirely on, on statements, you know, some of these things that are that we've lost because of the news cycle. And so, you know, I'm kind of a conspiracy theorist right like I'm a social scientist I look for deep so you know that in and of itself I think is something that we could actually leverage by saying, okay, that's a good thing to do, ask questions, but, but what do we do about evidence and so I know this is like one of those big questions of like let's fix all of journalism to fix Q and on, but I think rather than the question of focusing on Q and on. There might be something here to do with taking a look at some of these deeper issues that may very well be conspiracies and then say, this is how we deal with evidence when approaching these questions so when I sort of approach these things like as as a reporter. I am very I guess I like I do I'm very aware of the fact of what when he talks about and how like, everyone who like engages with it as a participant is giving an oxygen in some way and so I try to like make sure that they're, I don't have like a firm way of like doing a calculus for it but I try to make sure that there is some worthwhile trade off of it there is some like sort of justice component there's an accountability component. And I think that those stories are really useful. Kelly wheel at the Daily Beast and really good story recently on how like X Navy seals are getting into Q and on and that's really important story these people are like lauded within their communities they're considered authority figures. In some cases some of them are prone to taking their own action which could be violent and like effect real human lives, which he covers. I'm about to do a story and how some police officers are getting into Q and on. So I think like focusing things and those kinds of ways and not just like highlighting the absurdity of it are really useful and that's just like one type of useful story there's like other stories that have been done that don't fit nearly into that specific paradigm. And I think that's definitely a trap that I think I've seen people fall into is focusing on the absurdities instead of focusing on the real world effects right like it's easy to point and laugh at someone you think is saying something down. But when you're doing that you might be ignoring somebody who is who has some sort of authority or is otherwise exercising some kind of power and their worldview is informing it. You mentioned accountability which I think is a really interesting question. In terms of when we think about it in terms of giving energy so what we have seen a lot of is some praise but also criticism of Facebook and Twitter for finally taking action and having earlier taken action to sort of shut down these conversations on their platform but in doing so, aren't they sort of feeding into this worldview itself I mean is there any way for the platforms to kind of navigate that challenge. Yeah, definitely. I mean I mean they are but like I think that ultimately the only way to like, not the only way but a key part of maybe what is like one of the few pads out of this is for them to do things. I'm like less concerned about them elevating the conspiracies of the conspiratorial mindset of human on people by like making them feel ostracized than I am of them not doing enough. I think that they're still like gaping holes in how they moderate these communities. And how they stop harassment. And. Yeah, there certainly is that issue but like ultimately like the platform these things like not anytime soon will they die because Cuban on I think has already hit this like sort of critical mass point but in the long term. I think that these are like difficult things that have to be done now that might cause a bit of like short term pain that will like ultimately be most useful again hopefully I guess have you noticed those sort of those holes that you think they should be focusing on for now. Was there something you want to say when you. Oh, no, I will I can add on after you answer this question because I'm curious to hear what you have to say. Yeah, there's still like a ton of groups. You can see social media posts or like Twitter posts all the time from researchers who are like I'm still getting recommended to Q&A groups that's happening to me as well. I can still join a lot really easily. Facebook is a very vague threshold for like what Q&A groups do and don't get banned and it seems to be based off of some sort of, I don't know, I'm not sure what the full metric is. I imagine it's probably an absolute nightmare for the low paid contract worker moderators have to deal with it because they're just like their heads are probably spinning with all these sort of weird caveats that Facebook is laying down. Twitter, for example, can't stop this one Twitter account. That's one of the most famous Q&A Twitter accounts. He keeps coming back. He's posting all of his new accounts on Instagram. They haven't figured out that they can just go there and see where he's making new accounts. He keeps racking up tens of thousands of followers off each account before they get banned again for Twitter's ban evasion policies. Stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, so that was sort of what I was going to speak to a little bit too. I mean the thing about Q&A, I wish that I could say if we take X, Y and Z steps over the course of the next two weeks that within a fortnight we will have solved the problem. We already failed the test. Q&A is a stress test. Our systems failed it. It's how we try to mitigate that now and deal with the pollution now that's really a challenge. But I think that what Q&A points us to is the fact that there was this stress test that has been failed. And so now we have to start thinking systemically what went wrong and what can be fixed in the future. So again short term solutions. It's really tricky in figuring out, you know, how do you moderate, how do you deal with it on a day by day basis. I'm not saying that that's not important. But it's the long term structural problems that brought us to this moment that we have to figure out a way to address. And part of that is the opacity of algorithms and of recommendation tools generally. I mean there has to be more transparency there because part of the issue is once somebody starts looking for Q&A or Q&A related content because it's a whole suite of information, some of which is very extreme and some of which seems a little more innocuous. But once someone starts going down that rabbit hole, they keep getting fed more and more, and it is not unreasonable for a person who begins doing research and homework in earnest, and then arrives in this sort of magical world right where all of the evidence they're seeing is a story of the belief. Why would they not then believe that there was something to it? Of course they would. They're being dosented towards lots of what looks like evidence. The evidence does not correspond to objective reality, but it creates the illusion of that. And so there needs to be something done at the recommendation level, at the algorithmic level, so that people are not so deeply brought into these rabbit holes that they can't even see that they're in them anymore. And until we figure out a way to address that, the incentives of the attention economy and all of the ways that these bad things make these companies lots of money, we will be having the same conversations again and again about different stories from here until the end of time. And so it is time now for structural, it's basically, and I've advocated for this elsewhere, we're kind of at a place where we need a green new deal for the digital age. Like that's where we are, that until we're dealing with the structural stuff, you know, it's never going to change. And that's what makes answering these questions dealing with these issues so daunting and overwhelming and exhausting because it's not a button we can push. But we tweak moderation a little bit and then we solve it or, you know, journalism practices we just maybe change how we write headlines and then the problem is all we get is so much deeper than that. And so much bigger than any of any of us are, and that's what makes me tired. Can I jump in there real quick yeah just to tag on to that absolutely on the algorithm of transparency, but even more than that I mean so I've been looking recently at kind of reddit neighborhoods, so they're kind of bad neighborhoods and good neighborhoods on Reddit. That's really an oversimplification but people do tend to stick with their own and, and some of that clustering is algorithmic and some of it's just kind of a natural people flock together. Again transparent algorithms that tried to break that down could actually help this quite a bit so, for example, I'm looking at a given in a given month, something like 28,000 people submitted to the Donald which is now a dead group, but but at that point was a very popular group and and roughly the same a little bit less submitted to a group called change my view. They're only about 261 who crossed over that great divide between change my view, which is a group where people kind of are required to use evidence and argumentation and kind of are required to come together on around things and discuss them, only about, you know, a couple hundred people, and I'm shocked that it was even a couple of hundred people made that crossover so one of my quick big questions is whether you kind of code switch if you're on the side of change my view. Do you adopt that set of expectations around discussion or not. And so if you could, again, in a transparent way, have people, you know, shop from change my view to the Donald or to Q and on spaces that would make sense. So yeah, I think there are some things we can do from for moderation around, especially violent content, which is what what a lot of the stuff that has has worked reasonably well on Reddit and on Twitter. This is tricky because that means that you're it's hard to de platform the current administration. And so this becomes very tricky so this this week's drops from Q are heavily pushing insurrection and and you know violent insurrection and so those kinds of messages are very futuristic in intent. And so I think that there are are some things you can do that when you start to tread across that line. You can do moderation that makes that's very explicit and very clear and has nothing to do with content, you know, as content neutral, but says that anybody who's who's anybody who's advocating for for violent insurrection, at least in the United States is still gets tricky. It could could be in some way, you know, violating these policies but on a broader sense I think that we can look at ways of making platforms that that pull people together across these boundaries and that may do something, especially in places where there is this more rational or open discussion that might actually help some of this. And just to clear so I think we said this in the introduction to what Q is but just in case we didn't the drops are how Q communicates Q drops these clues and then the followers are supposed to sort of investigate them and see where they fit into a greater conspiracy and what they might be suggesting is coming next is that roughly right. Yeah, and the other thing too that I guess I forgot to mention is that Q is purportedly like a government insider. So the contradiction right is that like the deep state of government insiders is at war with Donald Trump and their enemies but there are like white hat deep staters who are inside the government who are good and Q is like a good person who is inside the government and the reference the name Q is like a reference to a very high level security clearance so this this person like according to them knows like a lot about what's happening inside the government. The accuracy the information they provide me to suggest otherwise but that's what they claim. I had a thought I mean as I was trying to think of you know what how to prepare for this conversation reflecting on you know what some of the similar what's changed in in the reporting over the last few years. And I kept returning to something that I that I encountered when I was doing some research working with journalists. I was talking about the rise of white nationalism and supremacy and in the way in the lead up to and wake up the 2016 election, particularly following Charlottesville and one of the journalists who I spoke to for this project was saying, you know, this Charlottesville he felt that journalists had become more adept at knowing how to handle low level small fish trolls. So when it was sort of, you know, these like random people on Twitter saying, you know, racist incendiary things, journalists had gotten better at knowing what to do. The problem point and the pain point for these journalists was that when the person saying those things was the president that poses a different level of complication and how and whether you report. And that's the same thing with Q and on one of the things that's been pretty fascinating in the work that I've done, studying this or emergence of the of the world you narrative paradigm thing is that for many many years Trump was although he was always he never repudiated it. He's always kind of had one toe in the deep state circle that's kind of, you know, that's been part of his personal brand right. But he hasn't really outright embraced it until recently I mean in 2018 he gave an interview that has stuck with me where he said, I don't like using the term deep state because it sounds so conspiratorial well two weeks ago or however many weeks ago because it doesn't exist anymore. He said that you know the, the deep state, ie the FDA was going to be delaying the vaccine, because they wanted to undermine Trump's presidency so, and he more explicitly more frequently more unabashedly has been retweeting stuff not that that's brand new but he's really like leaning on this as an election strategy so I think what I have observed is many journalists have been more careful about how they engage with Q and on participants adherence propagators. But when the president is the one who is propagating the theory and not just propagating it but laying the groundwork essentially to delegitimize the outcome of the 2020 election. That becomes a totally different conversation that isn't just about the specifics of Q and on but the way that Q and on so you know what Alex was just saying about how it's a call or I forget what one of you was just saying about calls for what you do when the president is doing that either implicitly or explicitly how do you report on that. And that's something that that to me still feels very vexing for journalists, it's vexing to me, you know when I study I look at the ethics of amplification. Trump has shifted his his real strategy to embracing this particular conspiracy theory. So that's different. It takes it to a new place and that's what makes it so difficult again to figure out how do we respond in a week because he's going to still be saying this through the election. A very quick side question from one of our audience members Ali could you repeat the name of the author of the Daily Beast article you recently just mentioned. Um, yes Kelly I think it's pronounced wheel it's like W I E L L or W E I L L. Thank you and audience members we are keeping an eye on the questions and we will move to the formal Q&A part in about nine minutes so keep sending in your fantastic questions. One question that I have is like how much does it matter the way we refer to Q and on so I think someplace called a baseless conspiracy theory. Some people call it a far right conspiracy theory. Buzzfeed News recently said that it will be referring to it as a shared delusion or something like that I can't remember to look it up. Is there like a way in which this characterization makes a difference. My thoughts on this. I've thought about this a lot because like as I write I'm like thinking about it and I saw the Buzzfeed thing where they decided to call it a collective delusion and like safer like I think at this point like it doesn't make sense to call it a fringe theory anymore but it's because it's not but like calling it like a far right conspiracy even though it's mainstream calling it a collective delusion calling it a baseless conspiracy is all descriptive and useful. I think that where I get a little bit where he is like when publications want to throw it out which this isn't a common thing I think it must be the only one that kind of did this that where they throw down like a the common an edict being like we're going to refer to this like mostly as a collective delusion that kind of stuff concerns me and that like using terms that like make it dismiss it a little bit I think are maybe not the most useful way of framing it it is something that is absolutely ridiculous but like the impacts are real and not ridiculous at all and so like you have to thread a line and how you describe it for the most part I think people do a good job it just goes back to like not being dismissed and then like understanding this real it's here. Do you have a preferred shorthand that you use in your reporting. I think just like right wing conspiracy theory, but I've used all of those at different points because you can't write that over and over and over. I mean I'm curious to hear that Alex and what do you think about that. I think it's really tricky. I don't think there's a good answer to this. I mean, my concern is in part that that like deplorables. It can be worn as a badge fairly easily and I and I kind of am concerned that it could radicalize those who are who feel like they've been pigeonholed into the screw I mean I have. I have a family who would not say I am a member of QAnon but who then, you know, there was a there were a bunch of nationwide arrests around pedophilia. And so when your friends share that. And are asking why isn't it being more more widely covered that's certainly an indication that they're leaning in that direction and so do I then say, Okay, you're part of a you're part of a right wing. Do you not and so I worry a little bit about the radicalization of insisting that anyone who is not. I mean, certainly there's this core right which is the satanic baby eating conspiracy. And then there's this this revolution of the things that, as Whitney has said has kind of been rolled up into it, which are people who tend to lean right and that's a very large portion of the population so so that's my, I don't have an answer to that. That's my non answer. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I think we that's something we've seen a lot recently particularly sort of following the pandemic, which has been kind of this inflection point. It seems like there's now a movement to sort of aim toward white suburban women by focusing on this sort of save the children message, making this not about the deep state but about saving children seems to have become a way that it. It seems to be going to actual streets we're seeing in person protests happening that have been organized online and then local journalists cover that and it's a little bit tough to say, No, no, no, we can't talk about child abuse. You know, there's a way in which now they are sort of protecting themselves a bit and Whitney I would love to hear your thoughts on this transition and particularly how local journalists could handle it. Very tricky. And part of the reason that it is is that you have a lot of people who are concerned about the children and are taken in for into the more sort of innocuous sounding parts of of the narrative, and whether or not you know those elements explicitly are referring to the deep state or not, but it still is implicitly you've got this cadre of high profile people, typically men, who are actively trying to cover up these crimes against children so that's not the deep state explicitly but I mean but it kind of is, and and that happens to correspond to the actual things that have actually happened in the world I mean Jeffrey Epstein was a real guy and he was real terrible and so you can point to these data points that aren't actually connected but they but they look connected or from a particular framework they seem like they could be at least. And so part of the part of the concern about having Q and on sort of moving into those spaces is that people who otherwise might not be willing to jump wholesale and to you know Q and on right away. That's an entry point. And then if and this is the thing that really worries me about buzz needs choice and other kinds of choices to use dismissive denigrating language to talk about it. If you're a person who in good faith has started to pay attention to and be very worried about what you believe is happening to children around the country and globe. And you are passionate about this and you are coming from a place where you're just trying to help to be then lumped in with a group that is basically being called crazy which is not only ableist but is really sort of it flattens a whole range of different types of beliefs and different entry points into the conversation that is not going to typically make you be more sympathetic to the news coverage that's calling you a crazy person. And so then inadvertently that could feed into the idea, not explicitly of the deep state, but you've got people who are trying to cover something up why aren't they covering up why aren't they talking about it. You can accidentally feed into some of the thinking that allows people to arrive at this belief and feel really good about themselves in this belief and that's extremely tricky. And I think that when you're talking about local reporters. They're on the ground they're interacting with folks who are at these rallies. Right. It's really, it's really tricky to figure out how you respond to someone I mean talking about the acknowledging the process of information laundering. The fact that Q and on is essentially being laundered through these other more innocuous, almost unassailable concerns right like who's going to say I don't want to protect the children. I'm calling attention to that process and also being really careful to say now just because you're concerned about the children does not make you this like crazy conspiracy theory not like talking to people about how they get their information why they get the information they do why they feel they're surround why they are surrounded by this kind of information. That's a better entry point into the discussion then look at all these these crazy conspiracy theorists because that's not how many of them see themselves and so that's just going to be counterproductive from go. That's actually a great opportunity for us to transition to our audience questions. Sabra errors asked something that I've been thinking about a great deal, which is how can we quantify how many Q and on followers there are. How can we measure it spread. Is it even possible. So what a part of where we get into this question of true believer versus somebody who's sort of on the fringes. There's a classification problem. Yeah I mean there's folks who Chuck Grassley and this got as part of the drop Chuck Grassley has this video yesterday day before of him picking an ear of corn and saying the corn is about to be ready, which is a bizarre video anyway, but it's just open to people saying, yes it's about to, you know, pulls into this narrative so neatly that if I were Q, and I'm not. If I were Q I would, I would have linked to that but, you know, there are if you look at the Twitter stream after that, it's like, we're, you know, Q brought me here like so there is that very explicit where you could go out and start to count people saying I'm Q right, but I don't think that would be very useful, a useful metric. I guess, not to be like the horrible pedantic professorial but like, what's the use of counting these, you know, it in some ways it reinforces the idea that it's a movement that isn't a movement. And so, you know, I guess the question is like, and why you're counting them. If you're counting it because it's an effort to see how much misinformation is happening in the sort of wider information environment that's a hard problem to solve but I think a really worthwhile one. If it's just kind of doing a headcount of Q followers. I'm not sure what that does for us. I would. Oh, sorry. Thanks. So my reporting like I've talked to a lot of Q and on people in real life at Maca rallies and like Trump rallies and there is definitely a range like sometimes you'll come across someone who like you asked me like you believe there's like a pedophile ring so like yeah you asked them, do you believe JFK is real and they'll be like not only do I believe that but I believe that like the front man of Lincoln Park, who died was jumping as the sun is involved in this conspiracy and it's like some other just outlandish stuff you've never even heard of, even as someone like who follows this. There are people who like, I talked to this guy who was like, scarily enough like a federal law enforcement agent who was wearing like a bunch of Q and on slogans at the rally and had signs and everything and I talked to him and we talked and he was like honestly like I don't think the pedophile conspiracy is real. But I think he was right about a lot of stuff and I think the anti corruption message is good. This is really hard to define. There are sort of like rough numbers we can look to polling has Q and on support somewhere between like 5% and like, I want to say like in the teens. You know, it can be questioned for a number of reasons it's hard but that would indicate like depending on what what groups they're trying to be proxies for that's like hundreds of thousands to even like low millions of people. But again, like what parts do they believe in like, what does Q mean to them. That's really hard to get. For me, so I'm less interested in the people who would identify themselves with the movement and who are you know staunch Q and on supporters they're all in. What I'm more interested in and more concerned about are the pretty normalized pretty deeply mainstream pretty well established ideologies that set people up to be amenable to the Q and on narrative and other kinds of deep state narratives you know Q and on might sound pretty extreme and it is pretty extreme, but the idea of the globalist leftist media kind of conspiring against real Americans. That's pretty well entrenched within a lot of far right thinking and has been for decades, and you know folks who are already kind of inclined to believe that. I never called it the deep state but that there's some group of sort of not really real Americans which is usually code units usually anti submitted code right. But that there's some group of people who are sort of calling the shots and you don't care about real America. That's that's pretty much a given for many many people. If the extent to which you believe that that's really going to influence how much credence you're willing to give the sort of lower level less extreme sort of deep state stuff. All the way up to Q because remember, I mean this is all a lot of coded denialism, even when it is not explicitly referencing the deep state or Q and on, it's drawing from the same sort of narrative trough. Maybe is you have this cabal again it's always a cabal sort of internal enemies, trying to downplay or overblow the significance of coded, you know maybe coded as a hoax maybe it was man made maybe it's just being exaggerated to hurt Trump selection chances. It's not a very rare perspective for for many people to have. And so it's for me it's it's those kind of ideological leanings that then make the more extreme Q and on seem more plausible because you're already kind of halfway there. And that I think is, I don't know how to calculate that number and I don't want to try because that would be that would be quite concerning and it is not it's not the case that it's just right leaning folks. And one of the things that's been particularly interesting about Q and on also as especially as it's collided with COVID is that you have a lot of sort of anti vaxxers and other sort of wellness types, who otherwise wouldn't fit in the mock course, you wouldn't think that they would go there. They're, they're also kind of falling into some of these thought patterns, whether they're going full Q and on is is a question but this idea that the doctor you can't trust the doctors you can't trust public health experts. You can't trust the government. You know, that that's something that those two groups might start from different places but ultimately they arrive at the same conclusion which is that you can't trust the official version of events. And it ultimately stems from this fundamental mistrust in establishment, anything. So, you know, the, I guess, for me it's sort of the extent to which you don't trust institutions that's going to be more of a predictor for whether or not you end up kind of going down these paths how far you get is the question but that's, again, a huge number of people across the country. And so just figuring out what to do about Q and on itself doesn't address all those underlying issues. And I think those underlying issues are really where we get into a lot of trouble. Yeah, because I think this is a really important piece to note which is that, you know, we have a long history of people who have wacky ideas, often from the left, and often kind of created that way, because there is the strong belief that elite sab control that thwarts democratic processes I mean going, some of this is kind of constructed and really weird, you know, things like levitating the Pentagon. You know, are you serious about that. This is the hippies and the whole movement through the 60s and 70s and 80s. And you know so the left has kind of owned some of this for a long time, in terms of kind of on on core, both uncertainty, and we're an extraordinarily uncertain period, not just because of COVID but because of a lack of basic understanding of of who the these are, and, and, and kind of confusion around that. And then frankly, deep economic issues and a lot of this kind of plays on those deep economic issues the reason that the working class in America is, is put down is not because of kind of deep structural issues around capitalism, but because there is a group of and this feeds into the kind of anti Semitic bankers, you know, there's a group of globalists who are seeking to keep you down. And so, you know, QAnon in some ways is an explanation that is that is attractive to a group that that probably has very legitimate critiques of the way that they have found themselves so like the, the environment here is right for someone to move in and kind of attract people to these ideals and, and you know so it is in a sense in that you are attaching an ideology to a set of very real concerns by a very large proportion of Americans. And I think that it is, you know, the fact that we have so that are attaching to this is in some way surprising because they want an explanation and a solution, and QAnon is offering that to them. And it is traditional kinds of scapegoating and, and you know, stuff that kind of has flowed to the right but it could just as easily be pulling a whole group of people because the, the field has been laid for this. Absolutely. This next question comes from Rachel Myrow. She asks, when your reporting is attacked by QAnon supporters on Twitter. Should you respond or does that just pour more fuel on the brush fire. I usually don't respond. Like, it's like playing whack-a-mole on like an acre of land. Like if there's like maybe some one-off instance where you can see something constructive that could come from it or like something like that, sure go for it, but like generally no, I have better things to do. There's just too much going on to like spend time on that. Do you have any thoughts of someone who has studied Shrules like we do? You know, I'm, I'm, because I've been doing this work for 12 years, I'm one of the things that's emerged from that is I'm really reluctant to tell people how they should or should not respond. I think what they feel comfortable with, what's appropriate for their life is going to vary across populations, especially, you know, what might be okay for a particular reporter, maybe because of the body that they were born into or the position that they hold at that institution, there's less risk in engaging as someone who, you know, is a freelancer or who is a member of a marginalized community who's going to get piled on in a different kind of way. So it really depends on who the reporter is and what the circumstances are, but the one thing that I would say there is that we have failed our journalists when the solutions have to be framed in terms of individual response rather than structural response, they should be protected by their publications and should have structures in place and support systems in place that they can draw from when this happens and it is a great tragedy. It's a labor issue for individual people to be put in a position where they have to make a choice. Are they going to engage or are they not going to engage some folks might have the support that they need, but many folks don't. And so it's kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't sort of response, and we need to and this is true in response to that question. And it's true in response to the Q&A issue generally that we need to be thinking about structural solutions rather than individual solutions because as long as we're stuck at the individual level we're not going to get to why we are here, which is all of these systemic structural failures so it. I don't, I don't know what an individual would need to do in a hypothetical situation I need to talk to them and would also want to offer them a hug over zoom because that sucks. And reporters put themselves at grave risk, and particularly, you know reporters of color trans reporters reporters who already are experiencing a great deal of heat on them. And they often don't have the support that they need so just say thank you for doing that work and I'm sorry that it's like this. Absolutely. Our next questions from MK Kellogg, who says it seems that there might be some evidence that Q is coming from Russia. Is there anything to support the idea that Russia either is responsible for Q or perhaps just amplifying the Q and on content. I think that it's, it's pretty clear that it is a fissure that could be easily exploited by Russia by interest in political interest more broadly. So I don't I haven't personally seen any very clear evidence that it is, you know, the, the, the remnants of the IRA or some very clear kind of influenced by by Russians or other not state actors or non state actors. And that said, it is kind of an open, an open trough from which you could draw and manipulate because, you know, the process of asking questions which is kind of the queue, you know, engaging seekers is kind of the as a rhetorical and outstanding way of gathering people around to queue, but it's also a great way of opening up the opportunity for exploitation so yeah I haven't seen anything explicit but it would not surprise me. I would be shocked if they were not trying to leverage that. I would also say that like, it is important and certainly like worthy of knowing but like our approach to it and like trying to deal with it and combat it shouldn't factor those kinds of considerations in that much like the IRA was really successful at drawing up like racial tensions in 2016 and like targeting certain communities and like the things that they were amplifying were real problems that were just under addressed and like the answer wasn't was never to just say like oh you know it's Russians pointing out the racism so like we can't handle it's actually like point out the problems that are integrating it and I'm really worried that if like Russia is like seen to be amplifying Q and on in a way that like people find it to be like sufficient to say oh no this is like a Russian plot and then like dismiss the argument based on that. That's not going to be convincing it's just going to like make these sort of discourse around it. Very low quality and very muddy. Somebody asked what is probably the number one question around who is Q. I think my sort of add on to that question would be does that even matter at this point. I don't even know if it matters to a lot of people on supporters. Like, I think it was Adrian LaFrance is I hope I'm saying her last name right Atlantic piece. That was like really comprehensive. She asked a lot of people this and like even if he was found to be like fake or something they're like oh no it's beyond that it's like a movement. It's a community. It extends like beyond just like the individual person. Some people would be disillusioned if it came out to be fake but I don't know it's created a world beyond beyond like Q itself beyond whoever the cute poster is. I don't know what fake would mean in this context right because what's really interesting about this is that it is an anonymous, you know, like an on right like the anonymous movement, it leverages the fact of it being anonymous. And I keep thinking back to Ender's game where, where, you know, these two kids kind of anonymously change global politics and so, you know, it opens up that really interesting question of like, you know what is the strength of an anonymous voice. But, you know, as a concept I think it's really curious and interesting, but as the actual person writing the words it's, it's I think trivial. Yeah. We have just five more questions which is a lot because I, or five more minutes and I could ask you guys about 25 more questions so my colleague Anthony when set asks Alex, I know Reddit uses a larger set of tools both from admins, such as quarantines and community powered tools like the modules to police content that violates Reddit policy. Do you think that this type of more community driven self policing is effective at clamping down on what might be dangerous speech, as opposed to something like Facebook, which does do something similar with groups or Twitter which does not. Basically, how does the sort of like self policing aspect of Reddit play into Reddit's response to Q. Yeah, so I think there's a couple. I'll just try to answer that briefly. I don't have an answer to that that is well thought out but I will say briefly I think it's interesting because there are, there is this federated response right so on subreddits people have been really interesting. I think that Reddit's great because you can look and see some really interesting experiments in moderation and some of these say we're moderating because we have to because Reddit says we do and some of that's just an authoritative piece that says Reddit saying there are certain things we have to moderate so that's what we're moderating, but a lot of them are doing interesting making interesting moves on that now the downside of that is that is that you know 1000 flowers bloom and if people don't like the particular subreddit it can kind of just pop up a new subreddit and this has been the problem of Reddit at a reddit wide level kind of just hitting a hammer on a bad subreddit is that it just sprouts up somewhere else. So I think there is a balance to be held there I think that the interesting piece so I don't know that the solution is that kind of federated small groups, keeping it going but I think that it is useful in that it gives us examples of things that might work within coherent communities smaller communities and so some of those solutions may percolate up to a broader level. That's fascinating. This is a long question so I'm just going to summarize it briefly and then we'll have one more question after this Kathleen Walsh asks isn't legitimizing these conspiracies by tolerating their illegitimate irrational and factual unscientific views making the problem worse. This kind of gets into something that Whitney you've written about before which is whether debunking as a useful approach to this. You're muted. And now I was. We don't always as human beings believe things because of facts very often actually. And so throwing facts that someone when, especially when they've undergone a lot of work to arrive at a conclusion. It's really not very likely that telling a Q and on believer a true believer that everything they believe is wrong and here are all the facts supporting that it's not likely that that's going to work for them. And in fact it might backfire in the sense that they might see you challenging that belief and then rope you into the conspiracy that you're pushing back against them, because clearly you're in on it somehow. And so while it's, while I appreciate the spirit of the question I really do, you know, why, why do we tolerate, why would we want to tolerate something that is just outright false. It's less about holding hands with Q and on believers and more about recognizing that just spraying facts at people who have spent maybe a lifetime amassing a particular belief system. It's not very strategic. It's not going to work with them. And there could be unintended downstream consequences so it's not about saying, it's not about refusing to say Q and on is false Q and on is false it's absolutely false. But there are reasons why believers get to that place of belief. And if we want to have any effort we want to make any headway in responding in a way that they could hear, we have to understand the context of how that belief emerges. It's not coddling. It's not saying the facts don't matter. It's saying that this is a complex rhetorical belief structure system that constitutes an entire person's being and throwing a fact check at them isn't going to fix the problem. So we've got to look a little deeper than that spend a little more time and maybe not call them crazy while we're trying to make sense of their world so that we can help and actually respond in a way that they can hear and maybe be willing to consider. I think, sadly, we are out of time for more questions, which is a shame because there were some great ones. But I think this has been a really enlightening conversation and particularly in the way it's sort of demonstrated that in a lot of ways Q and on is more case study of significant problems facing content moderation for social networks. Problems facing journalism particularly in terms of resources that are available and the speed of the new cycle and just the political system. So it's really interesting to see how that all plays together but also a little bit disheartening because it does make it seem like after Q and on we may see something similar. So thank you all so much for joining us today, a special thanks of course to our fantastic speakers who for giving their time and audience members thank you so much for joining us as well. If, if you enjoyed today's event you should also join us on Friday when we'll have three leading experts on police surveillance technologies with us for the launch event of the policing and technology project, a new initiative from future tense, and the tech law and security program at American University. And then next Wednesday we will be talking about how government can rally scientists and other creators in terms of emergency. And the problems that can emerge there so we'll be contrasting what happened in World War two with the challenges that big tech companies are facing today when asked to cooperate with the US government. Ali Alex Whitney thank you all again so much for doing this and I will see you online.