<
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/how-q-became-everything-big-feature-wayfair-balenciaga/>
"You can track QAnon’s arc, like most things in America, through its
relationship with corporate brands. Although the conspiracy movement emerged
out of fringe imageboards in 2017, its first viral successes came on Facebook
and YouTube, where its lore envisioning Donald Trump fighting an elite cabal of
liberal pedophiles was honed and refined. When Covid came in 2020, QAnon
ballooned under lockdowns, putting it in the mainstream, but leaving it short
of actually being mainstream.
Call it the Wayfair era. In July 2020, followers of QAnon began spreading a
particular pedophilic panic: the absurd notion that the online furniture
retailer was selling children for sexual abuse via armoire orders. Non-Q masses
took the bait: “Mentions of Wayfair and ‘trafficking’ have exploded on Facebook
and Instagram over the past week,” the
Associated Press wrote at the time,
noting that related TikTok hashtags “together amassed nearly 4.5 million
views.” A national human trafficking hotline issued a press release warning
that a flood of calls about the conspiracy had distracted them from genuine
work.
While it was widely peddled, it was also widely derided. Surely, something so
absurd could not keep going. And looking back on the uproar from two years
later, Wayfair seemed like the death of Q. By late 2020, major Q adherents had
been purged from the platforms. Its influencers and weird hoaxes almost never
broke into broader consciousness, except to be debunked. Its galvanizing
messiah, Trump, was on his way out of the White House. Q was no longer
inspiring people to murder mob bosses, kidnap their own children, or show up
heavily armed at the Hoover Dam."
Via
Garbage Day: The CEO Passive Content Obsession
https://www.garbageday.email/p/ceo-passive-content-obsession
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
