[Music] in tech watch a new report from the anti-defamation league says anti-semitism within q anon has intensified in recent months the report found the instant messenger platform telegram has enabled q anon to spread anti-semitism and conspiracies with very little fear of moderation from platform administrators for more on this i want to bring in cbsn tech reporter dan patterson dan so good to see you this morning you know q anon grew in popularity during the trump presidency but since president biden took office the group seemed to quiet down but according to the recent report from the
adl is the complete opposite happening hi good to see you so q anon evolved and it continues to evolve um look according to some research on platforms like telegram uh there are over 135 000 current active accounts uh and yet some of the q anon influencers are followed by uh 400 000 and more followers that means that that the q anon explicit community uh is limited but the number of followers attracted to these conspiracies is large and continues to grow another thing about telegram is that it is so lightly moderated that it has really allowed
these influencers to reach communities that are more receptive to their messages so uh where a lot of uh the early influencers like ghost ezra were kind of limited by algorithms on mainstream social media sites like twitter and only acquired about 28 29 000 followers on telegram they can reach a huge audience uh and they can speak in more overtly racist and anti-semitic tone so they're kind of priming their audience to receive messages that are more extreme than they would elsewhere you mentioned ghost ezra and ghost ezra is one of the most popular q anon channels
on telegram but can you walk us through what it is and its rise in popularity yeah so uh if you were a little bit confused by all the jargon and names here don't worry uh part of q anon and these online conspiracies is designed to be confusing this particular influencer um was fairly active on twitter until the 8th of january when twitter banned not just ghost ezra but subsequent followers and and many of the accounts or the persona's peers two days later uh ghost hazard joined telegram and in under six months acquired 300 000 more
than 300 000 followers this account posted in addition to anti-semitic memes a number of uh anti-vaccination and and covet 19 conspiracies uh the language uh approximated violence it came very close to violence and certainly pushed a number of other pretty toxic and untrue conspiracies even this morning i checked the account and uh ghost ezra was still posting about um disinformation about the maricopa county elections so this account although it's not the largest on telegram it is one of the largest q anon influencer accounts on telegram and continues to push conspiracy theories that have active followers
reading and re-sharing the conspiracies it's hard to talk about this because you don't want to bring attention to conspiracies but at the same time it's important for us to be aware of them so what stuck out most to you from the report about these conspiracy theories from the adl well although it is easy to kind of look at a lot of this stuff at least on the surface and go that seems really incomprehensible under the surface there are dog whistles that are designed to target particular audiences and uh look one line really stuck out uh
in particular and that was um backed up by their researchers who i adl researchers who i also spoke with and the line was ghost ezra is easily the biggest pro-hitler voice on telegram and the single largest q a influencer on the platform um and the researcher also added telegram has become excuse me become a preferred platform for q on because it allows leaders to directly control uh channels without fear of moderation from platform administrators unlike mainstream sites like twitter or facebook all right dan patterson thank you so much good to see you we should note
that telegram did not respond to cbs news's requests for comment you can read dan's full report right now on cbsnews.com
