This is a difficult case, because many of the people who posted about #SaveTheChildren and even got involved were sincere in their beliefs, and had no connection to QAnon. This is the ugly cycle of conspiracy theories in our unfortunate digital age. But of course, bans like that only fuel the beliefs among QAnon adherents that Big Media wants to shut down the truth.
That sort of radicalization happened so much that Facebook banned #SaveTheChildren on its platforms, since it’d become so rife with misinformation and damaging conspiracies. It takes slowly getting radicalized, and innocent-seeming campaigns like #SaveTheChildren can be a catalyst for some extremist beliefs. Most people don’t just walk into Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington D.C. But QAnon is a wide movement, with sects and varying levels of belief. Some QAnon beliefs are pretty outlandish, including ancient, anti-Semitic tropes around things like “blood harvesting” and Adrenochrome. QAnon believers on 4Chan interpreted cryptic messages from the so-called “Q” to mean that an elite cabal of corrupt officials were engaged in all kinds of horrifying behavior, including sex trafficking. As Whitney Phillips, a professor of communication and rhetorical studies and co-author of You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape told Vox, it’s a way to “launder QAnon into the mainstream.”įrom its infancy, QAnon hitched its wagon to concern about child sex trafficking. And in the case of #SaveTheChildren, major figures of QAnon plied people’s very real horror about sex trafficking as a back door for conspiracy theories with no basis in reality.įor example, some significant QAnon conspiracy theorists mixed concern about human trafficking (true) with lines about how political figures like Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks and former President Barack Obama are members of an elitist ring of satanic pedophiles (false). But that reality also makes it easy for opportunistic grifters to leverage people’s very understandable concerns. Who doesn’t want to take a stand against trafficking? The movement exploded, with posts garnering hundreds of thousands of retweets and even sparking IRL marches begging lawmakers to do something about the blight of sex trafficking.Įveryone agrees that human trafficking is evil, and nobody in their right mind would suggest people shouldn’t fight it.
On the surface, it was very hard to argue with. The movement called for people to get involved in the fight against sex trafficking, often through Instagram slideshows displaying chilling statistics. If you had an internet connection in 2020, you almost certainly saw posts about #SaveTheChildren.
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