Inside the dangerous plot to get conspiracy theories into the mainstream.
When the pandemic hit last March, 27-year-old Jennifer*, a childcare worker from Virginia, was furloughed from her job, leaving her with little to do but curl up anxiously on her couch with her phone. She’d spend hours a day scrolling through Facebook and Instagram posts about self-healing, spirituality, and trauma, mostly by wellness types she followed after getting interested in natural medicine a few years back. (“We seemed to be on the same journey,” Jennifer says of her online community. “I’d built up almost a trust with them.”)
But then a new kind of post started appearing in her feed: graphics “in pretty fonts with pretty colors” encouraging her to “Trust the Plan” or to be prepared that “Light Is Coming to Dark.” They were accompanied by an increasing number of posts (all misleading or false) on how COVID-19 was overblown, a hoax, or part of a government scheme to microchip everyone with a vaccine.
To Jennifer, these posts raised “innocent questions”—the kind that the online wellness community had always posed about mainstream health and medical narratives. “They were always like, ‘Put on your critical-thinking hats; this doesn’t make sense,’” she says. “I was in this vulnerable mindset—out of work, at home all the time with nothing to do but scroll online. I wanted to feel like I had more control over the situation than I did.”
From the smaller accounts she followed, Jennifer discovered bigger influencers. She didn’t realize that a vast trail of internet crumbs was leading her straight into the jaws of QAnon, an outlandish far-right conspiracy theory. One that she slid deeper into every day. “I found myself talking more to people online who I didn’t know but who shared these same new beliefs as me,” she says. The validation was intoxicating. Soon she was researching Pizzagate, a bogus QAnon narrative linking Democratic politicians to a child sex ring run out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
When Jennifer started hinting at what she’d discovered on her own account, a childhood friend reached out privately and encouraged her to make sure she was getting her news from legitimate sources. Jennifer brushed her off. “I felt like I had this powerful information,” she says. “Like I was better informed than everyone else. It gives you this feeling of superiority. When people would challenge me, I would just be like, You’re asleep. You’re not woke. You just don’t know.”
One of the stranger subplots in the long, weird story of 2020 is the millennial wellness community’s embrace of a radical, nonsensical, easily debunked QAnon conspiracy theory whose central belief is that high-level Democratic politicians (aka “Democratic elites,” aka the “deep state”) are running a global child sex-trafficking operation. As the theory has spread, QAnon followers have incorporated a tangle of other theories into the mix, among them that the government exaggerated the pandemic and that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
QAnon dates back to 2017, when an anonymous 4chan user claiming to be a high-ranking government official started posting about a vast cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government and Hollywood that President Trump (aka “hero,” aka “savior”) was secretly working to bring down. The theory soon spread from the “cesspool of the internet”—as Annie Kelly, a correspondent for the podcast QAnon Anonymous and researcher specializing in the impact of digital culture on anti-feminism and far-right groups, puts it—to Reddit, then to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok, although the original poster (known to followers as “Q”) now posts to the site 8kun.
On mainstream social platforms, QAnon mushroomed out from its initial audience of angry alt-righters to infect accounts previously dedicated to crystals, yoga, and manifesting, where it got a glow-up, as it were, from the more aesthetically minded set. Marc-André Argentino, a doctoral student at Concordia University who studies how extremist groups use technology, coined the term “pastel QAnon” to describe the watered-down, sound-bite-friendly version with much more mass appeal than the angry (and much more masculine) original. Suddenly, QAnon hashtags were tucked into selfie captions on perfectly curated feeds that also extolled the wonders of detox tea—the kinds of accounts Jennifer followed. Highlights like “Covid?” and “Trafficking” were sandwiched between “Workouts” and “Meditation”; other times, they were hidden in Linktrees amid brand sponsorships.
There were some obvious explanations: These were the early days of the pandemic, when everyone was online and everything felt like it was going to shit and all of us were seeking a clearer picture of what was happening than could be found in COVID-19 case numbers. “The pandemic gives people a reason to want to doubt the truth, because the truth is scary as hell,” Jennifer says. And then the wellness community, in particular, was full of trusted guides who championed doing your own “research” and questioning health information from official sources like the government, confirms Blyth Crawford, a research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London.
Influencer Krystal Tini (@KrystalTini), who has 147K followers and long blonde hair and often wears a gold crescent moon necklace, used to post mainly about yoga poses and health topics like alkaline supplements. But by April, she was sharing long viral video rants about how the government was falsifying the death certificates of COVID-19 patients, how it was all a fraud, sometimes adding a long list of QAnon hashtags: #Q #QAnon #QArmy #WWG1WGA #Truth #TruthSeeker.
“I’m not promoting QAnon theories,” Tini tells Cosmo in an email. “I support finding truth. I support saving children from violence and sexual abuse. If that makes me a Q supporter, then I guess I am on the right side of what is best for humanity.”
Yasmin Ibrahim (@MissYasminIbrahim), an intuitive guide and self-described “spiritual rebel” who offers “psychic circles and Zoom master classes,” first heard about Q last spring, and while she says she doesn’t support QAnon, she also says that “some of the things they were saying felt aligned to me.” She’d already started questioning news about the pandemic and forthcoming vaccine, which seemed to her like a setup. “Whether they’re elite, whether it’s a cabal or the deep state, I don’t know,” Ibrahim says. “All I know is that I feel from my intuitive connection and the research I’ve done that there are definitely people who control this.” (Ibrahim isn’t a “conspiritual” influencer, as they’ve been called, but she is vague about her sources, drawing not from actual Q drops—aka Q’s official communications—but “from all over the place,” she says. “I have some friends who work in politics—they send me information; there are some on the QAnon side who send me stuff; Instagram, Facebook, WikiLeaks, the internet, literally just researching.”)
Unfortunately, the mainstreaming of misinformation can lead to dangerous outcomes: In 2019, the FBI warned that QAnon was very likely to motivate people to behave violently. That same year, a 26-year-old man was charged with murdering someone he believed was part of the deep state. (The man has pleaded not guilty.) And just last week, QAnon supporters were among the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol—it’s doubtful that you missed photos of the “Q Shaman” in his Viking hat and face paint or the men in “Q” shirts roaming the halls of Congress. Some of them even livestreamed the events to their followers. The hours-long siege resulted in the death of five people, including a Capitol police officer.
A major reason that QAnon messaging was so successful on social media is that many influencers didn’t know (at least at first) that the language they were slipping in between stories on meditation and essential oils was linked to a conspiracy theory whose main goal was to prop up Donald Trump.
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