Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/16/a-major-qanon-hub-has-shut-dow.html
…
9 Likes
Meanwhile at the Q headquarters…
38 Likes
The Qverse is sufficiently fact-impervious that no amount of disclosure will make any difference. Obviously, outing one player in the hive will be rejected as “fake news” and the cutouts will make it possible for replacement sources to appear and compete for followers, who will choose or combine them to get the most attractive fantasies.
23 Likes
Years ago, in the days of dial up, I was on a BBS that was actively trying to come up with a plausible urban legend and make it go viral. We’d have gone insane had we come up with this Qanon meme for the penetration it has, but I would like to think we wouldn’t have been so sociopathic as to keep feeding the beast once we realized how far off the rails it had gotten.
24 Likes
I worry that the disappearance of QMap will be seen and/or spun as proof the Deep State exists and adherents will just double down.
14 Likes
Of course it will. That’s the essence of “fact-impervious” after all. Everything confirms the conspiracy theory.
32 Likes
profiles on people named across the drops (handily sorted into ‘Evil’, ‘Traitor/Pawn’, and ‘Patriot’)
Followers of the site, meanwhile, are informally sorted into the “Moron” category.
18 Likes
Qanon is its own prequel; it precedes the minds of the cult members who provide it fertile ground.
5 Likes
These people are all imposters - I’m the real Q.
14 Likes
over at Slate, a couple of recent podcasts by The Gist talk about how the whole QAnon thing is a “merchant-based domestic terrorist group,” that is, they exist and propagate their blather solely to sell Q-based t-shirts and other products to their base. They’re a grift with no goals other than making money for whoever it at the top.
18 Likes
Hm. I could take all the Qdrops, throw them into a database, cross-index and tag the hell of them, spit them out into a self-contained wiki with Disqus comments…
9 Likes
Senior IT exec at Citibank. If you have a Citibank account, do you feel as though your account information is safe and secure?
11 Likes
So it seems like a variation on religion - where doctrine must be taken on faith and having insufficient faith is evidence of a sinner/unworthy/heretic.
14 Likes
My favorite bit of Q lore was the crypto analysis of the ‘encrypted’ drops that concluded they are consistent with a person mashing keys near the center of an American-format keyboard.
25 Likes
I think there’s a notion of ‘friction’ that is essential to understanding how to fight this stuff. Whatever people think about the takedown, the loss of a key conversion mechanism to capture recent arrivals is a drain on the spread of the misinformation.
12 Likes
13 Likes
That take maybe be accurate, but it comes down on the side of Watkins being cynical and aware. I’m not so sure he doesn’t actually believe all this stuff. In the Skeptic movement we talk about this a lot in the context of things like storefront psychics. Some believe their own shtick and some are self-aware scam artists. Their motivation matters for how best to take them down. Either you try to teach critical thinking to the psychic, or you try to get the whole practice legally recognized as a scam.
/obligatory why not both girl
11 Likes
Arguably everything not derived from science and evidence is religion. 
5 Likes
Jim Watkins’ new connection with Project Veritas does not bode well.
Documents submitted to the Federal Election Commission last week show that Watkins is being helped by Benjamin Barr, an attorney who represented Watkins when he gave evidence to Congress last year and who is heavily involved in the right-wing Project Veritas group.
15 Likes
