“We Are the News Now”: Political Identity and Epistemology in the QAnon Conspiracy Movement

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, the School of Information, and the Department of Scandinavian.

Since its emergence in 2017, the QAnon conspiracy theory has been routinely labelled a “big tent conspiracy” or a “conspiracy of everything” because its followers’ conspiracizing unites diverse political projects from across the United States, ranging from New Age Health spiritualism to White Christian nationalism. This “choose-your-own-adventure” approach to a political formation defies the expectations of classic sociological approaches to social movements, which would suggest that social movements require clear, coherent frames in order to attract adherents, exert political influence, and persist. What can explain the success of the QAnon conspiracy movement in spite of its fragmented ideology? 

This paper develops a mixed-methods approach to studying QAnon’s ideological tensions and political organization by employing interviews and computational analysis of QAnon content. Using self-organizing maps and topic models, I investigate the relations between the various ideologies and identities present in the QAnon movement, based on Twitter data collected during the height of QAnon’s political activity. I corroborate and interrogate these large-scale trends with case studies of individual QAnon followers, who can be placed on this map. 

Ultimately, I argue that QAnon sustains its political momentum as a political cipher, which encodes a diverse range of political grievances and enables followers to decode contemporary political events.

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