With a gentle understatement, those of NewsGuard they say there is “relaxed moderation” on Twitter, a softer and lighter content moderation. Relaxed, indeed. Without a lot of verbal balancing act, that means there is virtually none, which is one of the reasons why the platform has become the disastrous reign of hoaxers, conspiracy theorists, deniers and various paranoids. Which in turn is the reason why companies are abandoning it: they don’t want their advertising investments to be accompanied by fake news and lies passed off as true by users who have bought the blue check to pretend to be authoritative.
Moreover, the team of moderators was among those most affected by the wave of Musk’s layoffs as early as November 2022and the numbers demonstrate this also in Europe, and also in our country: to date, on Twitter there is only 1 moderator who understands Italian compared to around 5 million Italian accounts (for comparison, on YouTube there are 229 and on TikTok there are 439). And the effects are increasingly visible.
In-depth analysis The lie of ethnic substitution and the other conspiracy theories spread by Elon Musk by Emanuele Capone 06 April 2024 In the NewsGuard graph, how QAnon mentions on Twitter have grown over time
The prophets of the QAnon theory on Twitter
According to NewsGuard’s most recent report on misinformation, on the social network that today is called (would like to be called) X the use of hashtags and slogans linked to the QAnon theory, which (simplifying) would like the American left and the Democrats to lead, grew by 1283% in just one year, in the period between 1 May 2023 and 1 May 2024 of a sect of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and you see Donald Trump as sole leader destined to defeat them and reign over the free world.
In detail, the quotes from QAnon-specific phrases and conceptslike The Great Awakening, WWG1WGA (the theme song for “Where we go one, we go all”, the conspiracy version of the Musketeers’ “All for one, one for all”) and others, increased from 81,100 uses between May 2022 and May 2023 to 1.12 million uses between May 2023 and May 2024. It is above all the fault of the many gurus of the QAnon movement that Musk has readmitted on Twitter, as @PunishDem1776which has over 290 thousand followers and a bio full of motivational slogans and platitudes, and Dom Lucrewhich has over 1.3 million followers and its own line of merchandising, including t-shirts, caps and stickers.
twitter: one of the craziest tweets about QAnon
Cern: Activation April 8
How many of you remember the post I did on Cern?
Remember I told you it’s just one gigantic Ouija Board?
Why did I say that?
The LHC demonstrates its macro-cosmic and multicontextual “as above, so below” ( Think Baphomet) awareness through its… pic.twitter.com/iIfwucUXpz
— Ariel (@Prolotario1) March 28, 2024
The most QAnon moments of the year
In the report, NewsGuard also mentions some of the posts related to QAnon that have had the most visibility on Twitter over the last year. For example, the one published last March by a certain Chris McNelly, who has just 6200 followers (and obviously a verified profile) but has collected over 2.1 million views with a tweet in which he claims that the so-called Pizzagate scandal would be real and that it would be “just the tip of the iceberg of evil that has infiltrated our society”.
Clearly it’s something else hoax, often shared by Musk himself: Pizzagate is a theory that in some way anticipates QAnon (as if it were a prequel) and sees the Clinton family still at the head of a satanic sect of pedophiles who meet in a pizzeria in Washington. A real pizzeria, which in 2016 was among other things the victim of an attackthen failed, precisely for this reason.
Again: a very long and delirious tweet from the end of March that brings together Alexander the Great, Tesla, a time machine and CERN in Geneva to talk about an interdimensional portal that should have opened during the solar eclipse of April 8 (and which unsurprisingly did not open) or that of Dom Lucre last January on a alleged video of Hillary Clinton that he was torturing a little girl. Both tweets are totally false, but together they almost scraped together 23 million views.
The Twitter case and the embarrassing mess of posts modified without the knowledge of users by Emanuele Capone 14 April 2024
google maps: la pizzeria Comet Ping Pong di Washington
It makes you laugh but it doesn’t make you laugh
Reading them, all these verbal rants about secret plans that no one knows but that the authors of the various tweets still managed to discover, they make you smile. Although in reality the real and tangible consequences in the real world are not so funny: over the years, the QAnon theory has been linked to numerous attacks and episodes of violence, especially (but not only) in the United States.
In addition to the aforementioned attempt to attack the pizzeria Comet Ping Pong of Washington in 2016, too the siege of Hoover Dam organized on June 15, 2018 by Matthew Phillip Wright, the assault on the Capitol of January 6, 2021 and the killing, on August 13, 2021, of two children aged 2 and 10 years old on the father’s side.
None of this is funny, just as it doesn’t even make you laugh (even though it might) the automatic response sent by Twitter to NewsGuard’s request for explanation: “We’re busy right now, please try again later.” It is exactly the synthesis of what the social network founded by Jack Dorsey over 15 years ago has become today.
@capoema