Inf✪rmati✪n Warfare:
How Australian QAnon conspiracy theorists are
manipulating American voters on social media to return Donald Trump to the White House
U.S. President Donald Trump is trailing in the polls, lacking a clear campaign message and running against a popular former Vice-President; but here, in Australia and around the world, millions of 'QAnon' conspiracy theorists are taking to social media as 'digital soldiers' to tilt the electoral scales back in Trump's favour.
QAnon followers have warned of deadly consequences if the plan doesn't work.
I spoke to several Australian 'anons' to find out what's happening.
To understand a theorist, you must first understand the theory.
"I was a Bernie supporter," a Melbourne-based 'anon' told me.
"In 2016, it was rigged against him."
"It was an amazing experience to watch the corruption play out," she said, referring to the Democratic National Committee's treatment of the Bernie Sanders' campaign.
After Bernie threw his support behind the party's nominee, Hillary Clinton, she felt as if there was "no hope of change".
Until, she said, "I gave Trump a chance."
"When he pulled out of the TPP and burned the fake news media, after their treatment of Bernie, I thought 'yes! you get them'."
She then joined pro-Trump groups on Facebook." It was a nice little community for discussion," she said.
But when QAnon appeared, just months into Trump's presidency, it immediately gained traction in her Facebook circles.
Within days, it was all-consuming. Within weeks, a fully fledged QAnoner was born.
QAnon is a sophisticated collection of conspiracy theories which rose to prominence via the anonymous image board site '4Chan' in late 2017, following the election of Donald Trump.
From 5G myths, anti-vaccination disinformation through to believing JFK Jr. is alive and hiding in Pennsylvania, there is seemingly no limit to the group's detachment from reality.
‘Q’ is the nickname of a 4Chan poster who is perceived to be a high-ranking military official, and ally to the President, who leaks classified information which alleges, without evidence, that Donald Trump is investigating a cabal of corrupt, cannibalistic paedophiles and child abusers, through backchannels at the National Security Agency.
Followers of Q believe a ‘storm’ is occurring, during which hundreds of celebrities, CEOs and politicians have or will be arrested and prosecuted for child sex trafficking, including Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres.
The theory relies on right-wing big-government scepticism, hyperpatriotism, historic anti-Semitic tropes, and sympathy for human trafficking causes to propagate into the mainstream. Experts estimate there are tens of millions of active QAnon followers around the world, including thousands in Australia.
At the time of writing, 21 Republican candidates for Congress in the 2020 election have directly or indirectly endorsed aspects of the QAnon conspiracy.
#AussieQ, a uniquely Australian movement
Australian QAnon followers taking the oath of allegiance. Edited by Tyson Whelan. Source: Twitter, YouTube.
Australian QAnon followers taking the oath of allegiance. Edited by Tyson Whelan. Source: Twitter, YouTube.
The Australian QAnon movement shares a striking number of similarities to its international iterations, including the theory that tunnels underneath major cities are being used to facilitate child trafficking, that centre-left politicians are neck deep in the paedophilic cabal, and that an unlikely billionaire (in our case, Clive Palmer) will expose the Satanist ‘deep state’ which is covering for the cabal.
“What is happening here in Australia is merely ideas,” a QAnon follower, who goes by @australian_ben on Twitter, said.
“Different ideas, new ideas, things are being looked at again more deeply, people are going over old ground and they’re finding holes.”
Ben, who is aged in his 30s, and lives on Queensland's south coast, said “these people [anons] regard themselves as defenders, first and foremost, they’re defenders of human ingenuity, and human decency.”
However, compared to other countries, the Australian QAnon movement is more divided among a number of factions – religious versus non-religious, UFO truthers versus Christians, Scott Morrison supporters versus detractors, alt-right nationalists versus refugee advocates and most controversially during the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-government ‘sovereign citizens’ versus staunch anti-anarchists.
What’s important to the success of the movement, however, is the steadfast belief in three key things: Donald Trump is good and worth fighting for to keep in power, child sex trafficking and abuse is happening at an industrial scale and must be stopped, and finally, that the rest of society must be ‘red-pilled’ in ‘The Great Awakening’ to understand the extent of corruption in the ‘deep state’.
And it is on those three principles, that the QAnon movement has manifested and found its way into the hearts and minds of approximately 100,000 Australians.
Australian digital soldiers on the battlefield
“In information warfare, we have to learn things like projection, hearsay, source, conjecture etc. tactics for how people interpret and discern info,” a devout follower of Q said.
This man who goes by @aussie_bot on Twitter, aged 37, living in regional Victoria claims there are over 100,000 active QAnoners in Australia, including “50 plus in my little town alone” – a town of 16,000 people.
“America is the front line,” he said, “if Australia can help Trump win there and expose the shit, all those on the other side of the fence ie Australia, will want a little bit of that green grass.”
The game plan was laid out in a post directly from Q on June 24, 2020. (Pictured right)
“Never retreat from the battlefield [Twitter, FB, etc.],” the post says.
“Use other platforms as a form of centralized command and control…organize and connect…source meme material from battlefield”.
The post includes a list of five missions to be undertaken by anons to dispute social media posts which do not support President Trump and his allies.
“Game theory. Information warfare. Welcome to the Digital Battlefield. Together we win. Q,” the post says.
A meme shared by @aussie_bot on Twitter, depicting politicians including Julia Gillard, Tanya Plibersek and Julie Bishop with devil horns, was retweeted by Clive Palmer in 2018.
The victims of the ‘digital battlefield’ would be exposed to the imagery on the right of screen. These photos were uploaded by QAnon linked accounts on Twitter and Facebook.
A Melbourne woman, aged in her 30s, said she joined QAnon groups specifically designed to organise social media flooding in an effort to tarnish the reputation of American political figures.
“There’s a group that I was part of, and I actually regret first of all because my Twitter got banned, it was a Q group that said [for example] “today let’s make [James] Comey memes and flood Twitter with your Comey memes,” she said.
“And then the next it would be Whoopi [Goldberg] day…it was sort of ‘make your memes then flood Twitter’.”
When asked if she thought this sort of reply-spamming, by foreigners outside of the US, was unethical she said “is it unfair? I don’t think so.”
“It’s a bloody open market, and people will get chased out, people will get annoyed but it’s information – you’re not going to like a lot of it – [but] there’s spam everywhere”.
When @australian_ben was asked if this level of digital organising amounts to foreign interference in the 2020 election he said “of course it does, that’s exactly what it means, don’t get it twisted…that’s what happens.”
He suggested that it’s justifiable due to Kevin Rudd hiring members of Barack Obama’s campaign staff for the 2013 Australian Federal election race.
Engagement drives growth, growth drives radicalisation, radicalisation drives violence
Shayan Sardarizadeh is a BBC journalist covering online disinformation and conspiracy theories.
He’s concerned recent efforts by social media companies, to rein in QAnon conspiracies, are “too late”.
“The QAnon argument has already reached tens of millions of people, it’s so difficult now to put this genie back into the bottle.”
"In the US, there's already millions of people who believe in it," he said.
"And around the world, I would think there are tens of millions of people who completely or partially have seen this thing and believe in some parts of this."
A recent poll of American voters by Civiqs found 56 percent of Republican either mostly (33%) or partly (23%) believe the QAnon theory. While 72% of Democrats said the theory is "not true at all".
The poll also found QAnon awareness to have grown from 65% in 2019 to 86% in 2020.
Mr Sardarizadeh believes social media companies are not taking the threat of QAnon's rapid expansion seiously enough.
"I'm a journalist and I believe in free speech...however, you can't allow a conspiracy theory, with quite a lot of potential to cause a lot of real world harm, to fester," he said.
A recent report by Insider media detailed eight examples of QAnon believers in the US committing crimes in the name of appeasing the Q movement.
Among them was Edgar Maddison Welch who was sentenced to four years behind bars in 2016 after firing an assault rifle in the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlour in response to a QAnon pre-cursor theory which suggested the shop was harbouring a child sex trafficking ring.
QAnon conspiracy theorist Michael Meyer was arrested for trespasssing, burglary, theft and criminal damages in 2018 and 2019 after tampering with water tanks in Arizona, meant for migrants, which he falsely believed served part of a sex trafficking ring.
In 2018, Matthew Wright blocked a bridge across the Colorado River using a van filled with ammunition.
He told police he refused to hand himself in until the Inspector-General released a non-existent report into former FBI Director, James Comey.
He later agreed to a guilty plea on three charges, including terrorisn.
Q's rap sheet goes on.
During the September wildfires across much of America's West Coast, 9-1-1 dispatchers were "overwhelmed" with QAnon fans flooding phone lines, falsely claiming 'Antifa' activists were responsible for the blazes.
"QAnon is past the point of just being an online movement, where just some people are digital soldiers, in the real world it's a whole different thing," Mr Sardarizadeh said.
According to Sardarizadeh's research, just 230 QAnon Facebook groups and Instagram accounts had generated nearly 140 million views from January to August this year.
In Australia, celebrity chef Pete Evans has repeatedly shared QAnon inspired and branded content to his nearly 2 million Facebook and Instagram followers.
And a QAnon theorist ran for Federal parliament in the recent Eden-Monaro by-election, according to Australian technology news site Gizmodo.
The Australian Q-linked 'Millions Rise' Facebook group, which had over 120,000 members, was recently banned, according to The New Daily.
QAnon groups responded to Facebook and Twitter bans on certain hashtags, by hijacking the otherwise innocent #SaveTheChildren and #SaveOurChildren.
Unsuspecting social media users began using the hashtags, without knowing the source of the trend. This promoted the QAnon movement further into the mainstream.
QAnon's reach is growing, yet government bodies "seem to be completely asleep to this huge, huge threat", Sardarizadeh said.
He is most conerned about what will happen when the so-called 'cabal' is not subjected to punishment, as Q has promised.
"When the penny drops that there is not going to be these mass executions, how are these people going to lash out and react?"
"Some of them are ready to resort to violence...to go out and shoot people, or harm people...and they say it publicly."
The fallout
When I first reached out to QAnoners for this story, I was offered a fairly blunt warning.
"You may not want to cover Q bud, and just let the anons go about their business," the man said.
"Either way you lose. One, burn anons and they target you, ruining your socials. Or two, back them and most likely lose your job [in the media]."
I chose the former, because the latter is guaranteed to ring true. Not because believing them is intolerable by news executives or the mainstream media having a vendetta against anons, but because to "back them" would be to sacrifice the most fundamental principle of journalism: truth.
From all available evidence, the suggestion there is a high-ranking military official using addictive image boards - to communicate anonymously on behalf of a President who has publicly expressed no understanding of the conspiracy - is completely detached from reality.
QAnon is fictitious.
At best, a hobby for the easily amused. At worst, dangerous.
Anons are held hostage to their own delirium. No fact-check, debunking or unfulfilled prophecy can save them.
When I asked Australian QAnon followers what would happen if Donald Trump is defeated by Joe Biden in November, I was given an insight into how a cryptic online hobby can become a real life hazard.
"If Donald Trump doesn't take this election, it doesn't matter how many guns people are going to buy now, because if Biden wins the election - it's over," one anon told me.
"Desperate people do desperate things."
A female anon said "there would be revolutions...they've got their guns...it would be a scary situation."
As Q's post (screen left) decries, QAnon's army of 'soldiers' will continue making that elusive 'digital battlefield' a canvas for pro-Trump propaganda, luring thousands, even millions, more down the rabbit hole of conspiracy.
If there is one redeeming truth to the QAnon movement otherwise steeped in fiction, it is in their oath: where they go one, they go all.
Once inside, there is no going back.
bonus content:
this is one of qanon's recruitment videos.
first published, and still publicly available, on youtube in 2018
titled 'q - the plan to save the world'.
warning: it contains a litany of false depictions.
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