Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America

by Will Sommer

As DiResta tracked where the groups overlapped, she noticed that joining one conspiracy theory group meant Facebook would prompt her account to join a group devoted to an unrelated, but equally false, belief. Facebook was pushing the conspiracy theory communities together, setting the stage for a superconspiracy like QAnon to take them all over. Right as QAnon started to infiltrate Facebook’s network in 2018, DiResta noticed prompts urging her dummy account to join QAnon groups. But the Facebook algorithm wasn’t just promoting QAnon to her antivaccine test account. It was also pushing people interested in other fringe movements toward Q. Facebook’s algorithm had turned into a massive funnel pulling people from unrelated conspiracy theory communities around the site into QAnon. Facebook’s QAnon groups turned into radicalization swap meets where antivaccine activists could trade extreme ideas with militia members and flat-earthers.