Only a handful of small and largely inactive communities were left behind, as was one oddly dedicated poster. In September 2018, r/TheGreatAwakening was banned as well, along with the 17 other major QAnon subreddits, for similar reasons. It was banned for inciting violence and for sharing people’s personal information without their consent, a harassment tactic known as doxing. So here are the basic facts of what Reddit did to quell QAnon, whether it meant to or not: In March 2018, the site shut down the original QAnon subreddit, r/CBTS_stream, which had about 20,000 subscribers. Read: Reddit is finally facing its legacy of racism But to see that as a success story, you do sort of need to excise the chapter in which a man deluded by the online conspiracy community stormed into a pizza restaurant with an assault rifle 11 days later. This is true: r/Pizzagate was created in early November 2016 and was banned by Reddit the day before Thanksgiving.
Reddit banned r/Pizzagate “pretty rapidly,” he added. When I reminded him that the Pizzagate subreddit grew to 20,000 subscribers in its first 15 days, he conceded that November 2016 was a “dramatic period in history,” during which a number of communities took off with surprising speed. He suggested that Reddit users are more skeptical and discerning than other people online, making it difficult for conspiracy theories to gain traction on the platform. Chris Slowe, Reddit’s chief technology officer and one of its earliest employees, told me, point-blank: “I don’t think we’ve had any focused effort to keep QAnon off the platform.” Unfortunately, Reddit is not particularly good at explaining how it accomplished such a remarkable feat. Understanding why could be a valuable first step in dealing with the broader problem, one of the biggest and strangest that social-media companies have yet to face. It read, “Q-ANON … i want to believe, but let’s be honest, it’s bullshit.” Reddit has plenty of problems, but QAnon isn’t one of them. Yesterday morning, the most popular post about QAnon on my Reddit homepage was from r/conspiracy-a large and sometimes dicey community where truly anything goes, the wilder the theory the better. In 2018, Reddit and Facebook both had QAnon-related groups with numbers in the tens of thousands. Read: The women making conspiracy theories beautiful On Instagram, QAnon theories have been so thoroughly laundered and mainstreamed by wellness and lifestyle influencers, they’re almost impossible to separate from aestheticized “sponcon.” But on Reddit, new discussion threads don’t take off, and the major subreddits are gone. Twitter is similarly struggling, despite a significant overhaul to its “coordinated harmful activity” policy that gives the company more latitude to slash-and-burn clusters of QAnon-related accounts. The New York Times speculated last week about whether Facebook “will be locked in an endless fight with QAnon,” as the platform’s latest and most dramatic efforts to slow the movement’s spread through groups with millions of members seem to be failing. They also started posting threats to murder Hillary Clinton, inspired, they said, by their rage over her superhuman ability to make military planes fall out of the sky. By August of that year, the 70,000 members of r/TheGreatAwakening had misidentified a mass shooter and doxed an innocent person. Reddit is where QAnon first went to attract a mass audience when it left the dark, unnavigable threads of 4chan, and Reddit is where it found a new group of people who were willing to spend hours a day doing “research” and analyzing “clues.” QAnon’s presence on Reddit ballooned throughout 2018.
But on Reddit, the movement no longer has any meaningful presence. Last week, new polling showed that nearly half of Americans have now heard of QAnon. But at the time, it was a massive problem on Reddit, where conspiracy-minded members of the Trump-themed subreddit r/The_Donald had long stoked theories such as Pizzagate, and where a QAnon subreddit called r/TheGreatAwakening had racked up 70,000 subscribers, some of whom posted hundreds of times. Two years ago, most Americans knew nothing about QAnon, the ever-growing, diffuse, and violent movement devoted to a loosely connected set of conspiracy theories, most of which tie back to the idea that Donald Trump is leading a holy war against a high-powered cabal of child traffickers, some of whom drink blood.