Expressions of Belief in the QAnon Conspiracy Movement
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Abstract
QAnon is a conspiracy movement that began largely in online spaces in October 2017. The movement has been implicated in a variety of violent actions, including participating in the January 6 insurrection, spreading medical misinformation, perpetrating multiple murders, and fomenting distrust in the American system of governance. While researchers and journalists have painted the movement as a monolithic belief system with a homogenous group of participants, we urge caution in using this approach. This paper is a content analysis of 3,251 comments made by online users in response to posts made by Q between November 3 and November 5, 2017, during the early days in which QAnon coalesced. We coded comments to the “Q Drops” and found participants fall into one of the three categories: 1) Believers, 2) Skeptics, and 3) LARPers (live action role players). We chose this section of content to analyze because of a series of failed predictions by Q, just as the conspiracy theory began to crystallize into a research community, which we believed would be an inflection point for the movement. We find that participants in the QAnon movement during these heady early days remained invested in developing the theory despite the failed predictions and that the movement’s formation was far more heterogenous than previously assumed.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Deviant Behavior on 08 Sep 2025, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2025.2556939.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Deviant Behavior on 08 Sep 2025, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2025.2556939.