How social media stoked the QAnon fire, and what it did to families

In October 2017, an anonymous user calling themselves "Q Clearance Patriot" began posting on 4chan, claiming to be a government insider with privileged knowledge of a secret war against a paedophile cabal trying to control politics and media. This became QAnon.

By January 2019, a man had posted videos referencing QAnon before setting fire to a Washington, D.C. restaurant, believing it was a location where children were being kept. He was arrested. This, along with a great deal of other evidence, has thoroughly debunked the QAnon theories — but it has since become an umbrella term for a whole constellation of internet conspiracies.

Two things converged to make that possible.

First, the algorithm, and the way marketing aligned with it. One political party's social media management team estimated, in an April 2019 internal report, that they had shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative — explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm. The result was a steady amplification of moral outrage and political hostility: fertile ground for an ideology like this one to take root and spread.

Second, the pandemic. National lockdowns arrived with different rules in different places, built on shifting and uncertain information. Freedoms were restricted. Confusion was constant. And some of the people making the rules were later caught breaking them.

Together, this produced something psychologists call epistemic mistrust — a systemic loss of faith in the institutions that are supposed to tell us what's true. Once that trust breaks, alternative narratives start to feel more credible than they should, because they offer something official channels no longer can: a sense of control in a world that feels chaotic.

Add to that the sheer amount of time people spent online during lockdown, and QAnon's anger-primed content reached further than it ever could have on its own. People absorbed fragments of it without always knowing where the ideas had come from.

Ideologies don't stay still. They travelled from fringe forums into ordinary conversation, and, as moral outrage tends to, they didn't stay online. They arrived at the family dining table.

I've heard about siblings who no longer speak. Parents who can't have their children over for Christmas. Friendships that quietly ended over something someone saw in a Facebook post.

The algorithm didn't create QAnon. But it took a fragile, appealing belief system and delivered it into millions of homes at exactly the moment trust was already breaking, and a screen was the only window most people had to the outside world.

If there's one thing worth taking from this, it's that the rupture between a parent and a child over a belief like this was never really a political disagreement. It's what happens when a system built to profit from division gets left unchecked. A defence — against the algorithm, and against the slow erosion of shared reality — is to pay close attention to where our information comes from, and to keep holding on to the people still sitting across the table.