James Ball goes down the QAnon rabbit hole | On The Record

conspiracy theories are nothing new whether it's about the moon landings being faked shape-shifting lizard people or Flat Earth die hards there are millions of people who believe in coverups and plots to deceive and control us we invited James ball an investigative journalist and author to talk about perhaps the biggest and potentially the most dangerous conspiracy group out there qanon qanon grew out of an online Message Board back in 2017 and quickly gained momentum and followers its influence eventually reaching all the way to the White House so strap on your tin foil hat as we learn

more about the dangers of [Music] qanon James ball thank you very much for coming on to on the record um first question can you tell me something about qanon that would scare the heck out of me um possibly the people in maybe 20 plus countries believe it there are probably about 2% of the population in America will admit to being signed up to it and a heck of a lot of them have guns and it's been connected to PO attempts in Germany to murders in the UK to kidnappings it is a scary thing okay now

I know it's a part of our jobs to be curious but I'm very intrigued to know why you started to write a book about qon I mean what why did you want go down this Rabbit Hole I think the honest answer is that I got interest in kin on because it's really stupid it's starts simple just it's just it's just dumb it's um it starts on foran which is this sort of foreign populated by teenage boys who like trolling online and its big thing was that President Trump was leading a secret resistance that would get

uh Hillary Clinton arrested within a couple of weeks which obviously didn't happen and so why six seven years on from that are people still thinking that it's this big huge true conspiracy and so that question how can something that's so dumb and was so wrong become so dangerous that gets you interested that's my next question I mean you say it's stupid and dumb but for some reason uh for some people it's very real so how did it gain traction how did it become this Niche site and how did it become so powerful so I think

the important thing is you don't actually have to be dumb to get pulled into qanon it's actually quite clever quite curious people who will and it's because it never stuck with what the initial poster said that you know it was about Clinton getting arrested because it never really had a leader you know like Cults have a leader who says yes this is what we believe no this isn't it kept pulling in more and more conspiracies it pulled in anti-Semitism it pulled in islamophobic conspiracies all sorts of different things kind of glued into it and so

a guy I talked to in the book says it kind of became the conspiracy theory that ate all the other conspiracy theories and I really likes that phrase so when did it gain its legitimacy when it became I don't know I don't want to say it a trusted site but it just started to get bigger than what it should be so the thing with the thing when it was on 4 chat is everyone kind of knew they were joking they sort of knew it was someone messing with them and playing about but it was quite

fun to act as if you believed it and to see if you could get far right sites to write it up and that kind of thing and what changed it was influencers and there's loads of YouTube influencers particularly who like doing videos on conspiracy theories and when a new one starts doing numbers they'll move and try that out you know I think some of them believe what they're saying but some of them literally just go with whatever works and so they look on Reddit they look on YouTube they they look on for and they look

around the place to kind of see hey what might break through and qanon did huge numbers and these people didn't really know it came off forchan they didn't know it you know the silliest sides of it they're going to get explained in these really nice package videos that's when it starts going viral well you've described qanon as a rare movement that can radicalize an Andrew Tate's loving teenager and his Holland and Barrett's mom um I was going to say out of those two who would you say is the most vulnerable so the interesting thing is

I think who's most susceptible to q and on I'd probably go with the mom um a lot of people get pulled into conspiracy theories through wellness and people get into Wellness for quite legitimate reasons women are more likely to suffer from chronic pain conditions and conventional medicine is rubbish and doesn't really try to help them doctors are often really unsympathetic they don't sort of treat these conditions seriously they don't listen to them and so they start moving to an alternative and they're angry with the mainstream there's a real grievance there and so if you start

hearing that big farmer bad that's going to sound right to you if you start thinking that they're up to something actively malign with vaccines that sounds plausible and so you get pulled into deeper and deeper into it until you start thinking Bill Gates is microchipping people so I think they're most likely to get pulled in but I think the the most dangerous people when they are pulled in is the men so I think women are more likely to be pulled into it and probably are the majority of Qin on now but I think it's the

men in Q andon that are the most likely to get violent and how much did the the co pandemic play its part as well I think the pandemic had two big effects on Q andon in particular and conspiracy theories in general um on conspiracy theories in general we were all stuck at home we all had a lot of time we're all sort of browsing around we're a bit bored we're in a bad mood that's exactly the circumstances that's going to send you down the YouTube rabbit hole and so you know Q andon being of the

moment anyway it really helped Kon but you also for once had a really weird government power to push against like you had this new disease that wasn't there before and now somehow we've got to shut down the world for it the government says you can't all in the same situation so we're all kind of bounded by that the government says you can't walk your dog but you've got to have a jab to be able to go into places like it was the biggest extension of State Authority in almost all of our lifetimes certainly in Western

democracies it was but I think in most countries and so it's obviously going to get a push back of well are we sure this is real are we sure this isn't a control thing and so together that's going to have a big effect on convincing people of conspiracy you've described qon as well as the first digital virus um two things one what do you mean by that and two what's going to be the next digital virus what what what can you tell us from all your your research and that rabbit hole you went down so

the reason I'd say it's the first digital virus is usually we called talk about computer viruses we mean something that makes your laptop not work or you've got to pay some hackers some money um I'm not talking about that I'm talking about something that infects us but instead of traveling through water or through droplets in the air travels through the internet and I use this because no one's controlling Qing on it's not that there's some North Korean group behind it or some Russian disinformation Mastermind who's calling the shorts It's evolved it changes no one's running

it and it's not alive so how can you regulate something like that this is actually it's very powerful beyond belief so who could at something like this I think in the same way as you don't say how do we regulate a virus you know we could try Banning the common cold it'd be great if it would work but it wouldn't we look at what we can do to tackle them and so you might look at what can you do about people who are deliberately creating or spreading them what could you do to stop them spreading

early so you know when you see influencers start to push a new conspiracy theory maybe tackle it before it goes globally viral rather than after maybe put content warnings and things like that earlier so you don't have to ban free speech um so it's that kind of Public Health how can we make it spread slower approach so that we don't end up having to take drastic action when it's big you know we don't want an information lockdown well yeah that's very true um another um I suppose big talking point lately has been artificial intelligence AI

how is that going to be a disruptor for something like q and on moving forward I mean one of the scary things is that you see with qanon a lot of very cleverly edited videos when you can fully deep fate convincingly it's going to be really really difficult to convince some people that it didn't happen we're going to have to think about how could you Watermark how could you maybe use blockchain or something like that to go this is real information and AI is going to turn that into a race it's not going to make

new problems in this area but it's going to make all of the existing ones harder to solve is that the next uh digital virus would you say AI I think AI will probably be an accelerant of the next digital virus but it could be anything I mean which ideas catch on is really interesting to me because you can't predict it so one at the moment is 15 minute cities which has turned This Global conspiracy that you won't be allowed to leave the area around your house without a government permit and this came from a like

traffic calming plan in Oxford like a boring local government let's try and reduce air pollution thing has turned into a global conspiracy in your experience in in all your research when does something become a conspiracy so it's hard to say a lot of things that sound like conspiracy theories end up being true you know we have to we have to admit this sometimes there really is a conspiracy I think where it turns into a silly conspiracy theory is when there's no evidence that would persuade someone off it or when generally if it would involve thousands

of people to knowingly be acting in on something is probably not happening so Watergate would have sounded like a conspiracy theory the president paid these people to burgle and it was like no in the white house but it only required maybe 15 or 20 people to know about it and you could start finding evidence that connected it rather than evidence that didn't and I think you know I've worked as an investigative Journal list people think it's going how are these things connected and actually it's about kicking your story apart and going how might I be

wrong how might I be wrong how can I prove this happened and that's the difference between between proving a conspiracy and going into a conspiracy theory you've said recently that qanon is exploited by grifters what do you mean by that I think there are people who take advantage of qanon beliefs without ever believing it and that can be people who will sell things to stop 5G mind control which are usually just USB 6 with little lights in them and they'll sell these USB sticks for $500 you know that's a grift there's people who will use

it to boost their following on YouTube or Facebook or X as it is now and they don't care that they're like ruining people's relationships and their lives and getting them in trouble with the law and you could even say there's politicians that take advantage of it knowing that even though these conspiracies are dangerous it animates their followers and so you know Donald Trump very blatantly flirts with q on on stage and at his Ries I would class him as a grifter for that you would accuse uh Donald Trump of being a grifter I've accused him

of worse okay let's not go into that okay um finally um what's the difference between a cult and a movement it's a good question and I suspect uh part of it is like a terrorist and a freedom fighter it depends if you agree but I think a cult fundamentally exploits its members and a movement fundamentally empowers them you know a movement gives you more than you give to it uh and it empowers you and it makes your life better a cult tries to make you feel like it's doing that and then takes more and more

from you and I think as well a movement doesn't require you to disconnect from your real life from your real friends from your family and a cult does because that's the only way it can carry on leeching off you so I think movements are great people join movements but do you think is it taking from me or is it giving to me uh James B thank you very much uh for speaking to us uh on the record really appreciate your time thank you for having [Music] me