At This Point, Can QAnon Really Be Banned?
A Facebook purge and Trump’s infection weakens QAnon but not the alt-health libertarians of ‘Soft-Q’
No one can say for sure that 56-year-old pig-farming pornographer Jim Watkins is the Q that hardcore QAnons worship as their rebel prophet. If he isn’t, he’s close enough. Watkins owns Q’s delivery device — an anonymous imageboard called 8kun (formerly 8chan) he runs from the Philippines — and he maintains “custody” of Q through the ability to apply Q’s credentials to any troll he chooses.
What we can say for sure is that none of Q’s feverish predictions about Trump vanquishing the Deep State have come true. Hillary Clinton has not been arrested; photos of Barack Obama as an AK-47-wielding jihadi never surfaced. But Q did correctly predict that the tolerance shown by social media platforms for his increasingly toxic brand might be running thin. On September 17, Qdrop 4734 commanded followers to “Deploy camouflage. Drop all references re: ‘Q’ ‘Qanon’ etc. to avoid ban/termination.”
Yesterday, Facebook announced that its Dangerous Organizations Operations team would be deleting QAnon accounts, groups, pages, and Instagram feeds. For many observers, the action comes too late — more than a year after the FBI labeled QAnon as a domestic terror threat, and now…
