In May, Republican voters in Oregon nominated a QAnon believer to run for the US Senate in November. Partin said that he generally favored Facebook taking a “more aggressive approach to moderation”, including addressing the recommendation algorithms and trying to reduce the spread of misinformation out of dedicated conspiracy communities and into the mainstream. What's Down The Rabbit Hole ? “Facebook is a unique platform for recruitment and amplification,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who has been studying QAnon for years. As a result, nearly a year after Libra 1.0 was announced, Facebook announced Libra 2.0, a new plan for a more scaled-down, regulatory-friendly financial network. Another QAnon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is likely to be elected to the House of Representatives after she came first in a Republican primary in a conservative Georgia district on 11 June. The platform has created a ready-made digital pathway from public pages to public groups to private groups and finally secret groups that mirrors the process of “falling down the rabbit hole or taking the red pill”. Facebook also provides QAnon with an even larger pool of potential recruits than Reddit could, especially for the somewhat older, Evangelical crowd that has proven susceptible to QAnon’s messaging. Nearly two years ago, Reddit, the link-sharing network of interest-based message boards, carried out a site-wide purge of QAnon – and made it stick. You may have heard of them.”, David explained that in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, money market funds were quite popular, ”the idea was that you would put your money with them, the fund managers would put them into super-safe investments, and you’d get a bit more money back out. QAnon did not disappear after Reddit pulled the plug, however. Music event in Ewijk, Netherlands by MOJO and Down The Rabbit Hole on Friday, July 2 2021 with 11K people interested and 4.8K people going. In early May, QAnon braced for a purge. “That would be quite bad, because while the US dollar is maintained by the Federal Reserve for US interests…there is some sort of public service aspect to dollarization. “So Eric Trump posted a pic with a ‘Q’ in the imagery,” an administrator of one of the larger QAnon groups wrote. Thursday 6 August at 15 pm we'll let you know who the winners are. The digital architecture of Facebook groups is also particularly well-suited to QAnon’s collaborative construction of an alternative body of knowledge, Friedberg said. Thank you. The pages and groups that were removed in early May violated the company’s ban on “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – ie the kind of digital astroturf tactics that Russian operatives used to support Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. David also pointed out that Libra could have been particularly dangerous for countries with particularly small and fragile economies. ), But the potential for damage from QAnon goes well beyond. Recently, Finance Magnates went down the Libra rabbit hole with David Gerard, who recently published Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money.The new book serves as a definitive volume on Libra’s birth, growth, and the massive change in plans that Facebook was forced to make in order to preserve the project’s life. Q’s initial commentary on the Facebook bans was concise: “Information Warfare,” Q posted on the website 8kun. For example, Facebook was fined by the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for breaking its 2012 settlement with the same entity on user data privacy matters. Instead, its believers moved on to other platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Discord and – crucially – Facebook. 2 talking about this. While anti-government conspiracy theories were not new, the bulletin stated, social media was allowing them to reach a larger audience, and the online narratives were determining the targets of harassment and violence for the small subset of individuals who crossed over into real-world action. On 12 September 2018, citing its ban on content that “incites violence, disseminates personal information, or harasses”, the company banned 18 QAnon subreddits, the largest of which had more than 70,000 members. Several QAnon groups are flagged with an automated warning label from Facebook that reads, “This group discusses vaccines” and encourages users to go to the website of the Centers for Disease Control for reliable information on health. David Reinert holds up a ‘Q’ while waiting to see Donald Trump at a rally on 2 August 2018 in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. A man in the crowd holds a QAnon sign as crowds gather to attend Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, 21 February 2020. These groups and pages play a critical role in disseminating Q’s messages to a broader audience and in recruiting more believers to the cult-like belief system, researchers say. 112 were here. While Libra’s plans never explicitly say how big the project’s pile of reserve currency would get, “everyone’s guess was that the reserve would be on the order of a trillion dollars,” David said. Perhaps one of the biggest changes in plans in the business world was the decisive shift in the course of Facebook’s Libra project, which was announced in the middle of 2019. Getting deplatformed is harmful, but the idea that it would somehow make this disappear is fanciful.”. At the time of the Reddit ban, one of the largest closed Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon, “Qanon Follow the White Rabbit” had 51,000 members, according to NBC News. An Emporium of delights! I will be a long time customer for sure. 2.9K likes. The Singapore dollar is kept stable by two large sovereign wealth funds that add up to about $600 million or $700 million…that’s the whole reserve.”. your password. Enter your email address below. “We also remove Groups and Pages that violate other policies from recommendations and demote in search results. “Ever since 2008, the one thing that regulators fear is someone trying to do this again. I love Down the Rabbit Hole! Please check your inbox for our authentication email. “They’re talking about a group of people who are operating our government against our wishes and they’re molesting and torturing children and destroying our society,” said Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science who studies conspiracy theories. “That’s partly because they have a fundamentally different epistemology to judge what is true and false.”. And on 20 June, just before Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump’s adult son Eric posted a QAnon meme on his Instagram account. If the US abuses the power of the dollar, then people won’t want dollars quite so much anymore.”, However, the US is unlikely to want to abuse its power, because “the US gets really quite a lot out of having the dollar as an international currency. Facebook’s own internal research in 2016 found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”, the Wall Street Journal reported, primarily through the same “Groups you should join” and “Discover” algorithms that promoted QAnon content to the Guardian. Down The Rabbit Hole.Kefalonia, Argostólion, Greece. Despite the fact that Q’s prognostications have reliably failed to come true, followers rationalize the inaccuracies as part of a larger plan. A prominent anti-vaccine propagandist appeals to QAnon followers. 3K likes. “You can mechanically take those steps,” he said. The Guardian also continued to receive recommendations to join additional QAnon groups after its initial query to Facebook. “They’ve misbehaved in so many ways, and they’ve broken people’s trust repeatedly,” David said. with special focus on electronic trading, banking, and investing.Copyright © 2020 "Finance Magnates Ltd." All rights reserved. UPDATE - 20th August 2020 After excessive censorship, hugely reduced reach of this page, and eventually being banned by Facebook for not conforming to the Official Covid Narrative, I decided to leave Facebook and its insidious social engineering agenda. For those individuals who truly believe in the QAnon narrative, the crimes of the “cabal” are so grievous as to make fighting them a moral imperative. The new book serves as a definitive volume on Libra’s birth, growth, and the massive change in plans that Facebook was forced to make in order to preserve the project’s life. Does that take care of it? An Emporium of delights! Facebook had. One page that appeared in recommendations – “We are ‘Q’” – saw its following grow nearly 60%, from about 24,000 to about 38,000 over the month – despite the page not having posted any new content since February. While Facebook has policies banning hate speech, incitement to violence and other types of content that it considers undesirable on a family- and advertiser-friendly platform, QAnon does not fit neatly into any single category. Facebook’s algorithms appear to have detected this synergy between the QAnon and anti-vaccine communities. The Guardian did not initially go looking for QAnon content on Facebook. Perianne Boring Speaks, US Elections, COVID, Zombies, & Bitcoin: Miko Matsumura & Alex Mashinsky, Whatever Happened to Facebook’s Libra? Travel Down the Rabbit Hole in Tucson’s newest escape room adventures! Once he started searching, he couldn't stop. The company did not provide evidence for this claim, which is contradicted by screenshots of pages and groups appearing in recommendations that were taken in May. Asked about this discrepancy, Facebook said that the pages and groups in question had been marked as “non-recommendable” as of 8 April 2020 for violations of policies against clickbait, viral misinformation and hate speech, but that a page or group can be restored to eligibility for recommendations if its behavior improves for several months. Social media bans are often difficult to maintain, but Reddit’s move was uncommonly effective. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. He’s an academic economist; he’s not foolish, he’s not uneducated. WWG1WGA is a QAnon catchphrase. 2.9K likes. Libra’s entrance onto the global scene was made with the “move fast and break things” bravura that Facebook has become known for. QAnon is hardly an organization, though as a movement it has certainly caused harm and could be considered dangerous. “When do you expend ammunition?” Q wrote. David also commented on the public perception of the individual leaders involved with the Libra project. 1.5K likes. McDermott: Hawley's populist demagoguery is a smoother form of Trumpism. “We’re watching a normalization process of these conspiracies, and I think the beast that is Facebook was really the answer to this all along.”. After all, “it’s ok if you’re tiny and you’re economically illiterate,” he continued. encouraged to join a QAnon group by Facebook. We are your local purveyor of limited production, organic, boutique, artisanal, hard to … We’re closely monitoring this activity and how our policies apply.”. 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