This article presents a cross-platform analysis of the QAnon conspiracy theory that was popularized online from 2017 onward. It theorizes its diffusion as one of normiefication: a term drawing from Web vernacular indicating how ideas and objects travel from fringe online subcultures to large audiences on mainstream platforms and news outlets. It finds that QAnon had a clear incubation period on 4chan/pol/ after which it quickly migrated to larger platforms, notably YouTube and Reddit. News media started covering the online phenomenon only when it moved off-line, which in turn briefly amplified engagement on the other platforms. Through these data-driven insights, we aim to demonstrate how this cross-platform approach can be replicated and thus help make sense of the complexity of contemporary media ecologies and their role in the diffusion of conspiracy theories as well as other forms of mis- and disinformation.
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins of QAnon on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board and its initial reception as a potential LARP, we analyze it as an instance of participatory online play that fosters deep engagement above all. Drawing on concepts from play and performance studies, we theorize the dynamics by which QAnon developed into an influential conspiracy narrative as instances of “conspiracy fictioning.” In particular, we revive the notion of hyperstition to make sense of how such conspiracy fictionings work to recursively “bootstrap” their own alternate realities into existence. By thus exploring the participatory and playful engagement mechanisms that drive today’s conspiracy movements, we aim to elucidate the epistemological and socio-political dynamics that mark the growing entanglement of play and politics, fact and fiction in society.
In this paper we develop an empirical, big data approach to analyze how alt-right vernacular concepts (such as kek and beta) were used on the notorious anonymous and ephemeral imageboard 4chan/pol/and the fan wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica. While 4chan/pol/is broadly regarded as an influential source of many of the web’s most successful memes such as Pepe the Frog, Encyclopedia Dramatica functions as a kind of satirical Wikipedia for this meme subculture, written in high concept and highly offensive vernacular style. While the site’s affordances make them distinct, they are connected by a subcultural style and politics that has recently become increasingly connected with violent right-wing activism, forming a loose subcultural language community. Contrary to “memetic” theories of cultural evolution in media studies, our analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from poststructuralist and pragmatist philosophies of language and deploys empirical techniques from corpus linguistics to consider the role of online platforms in shaping these vernacular modes of expression. This approach helps us to identify instances of vernacular innovation within these corpora from 2012-2020—a period during which the white supremacist “alt-right” movement arose online. Through these analyses we contribute both to ongoing interdisciplinary attempts to bridge the gap between cultural-theoretical and computational-linguistic approaches to studying online subcultures, and to the empirical study of the vernacular roots of the “toxic memes” that appear to be an increasingly common feature on social media.
Current research on the weaponisation of far-right discourse online has mostly focused on the dangers of normalising hate speech. However, this often operates on questionable assumptions about how far-right terms retain problematic meanings over time and across different platforms. Yet contextual meaning-change, we argue, is key to assessing the normalisation of problematic but fuzzy terms as they spread across the Web. To redress this, our article traces the changing meaning of the term based, a word that was appropriated from Black Twitter to become a staple of online far-right slang in the mid-2010s. Through a quali-quantitative cross-platform approach, we analyse the evolution of the term between 2010 and 2021 on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan. We find that while the far right meaning of based partially survived, its meaning changed and was rendered diffuse as it was adopted by other communities, afforded by a repurposable kernel of meaning to based as ‘not caring about what other people think’ and ‘being true to yourself’ to which different (political) connotations were attached. This challenges the understanding of far-right memes and hate speech as carrying a single and persistent problematic message, and instead emphasises their varied meanings and subcultural functions within specific online communities.
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