[Music] in the last few months a bizarre conspiracy theory has taken root firmly on the fringes of the american right these people are taking an oath to q anon a mishmash of conspiracy theories which holds donald trump as the savior of the world and they hold some disturbing views the pandemic wasn't real and the race war isn't real it's creeping into the mainstream of political conversations just this past weekend you know trump retweeted human on dozens of times and it's tearing families apart the person i knew as my mother is probably not coming back newsnight
has seen data that shows a huge spike in interest in this conspiracy theory during the pandemic but what is q anon followers believe that a cabal of pedophiles runs the united states they control the media hollywood and politicians and the only person that can stop them is donald trump hi steph how are you doing good how are you i'm doing excellently travis view has been researching this phenomenon since its early days the most far out of these beliefs say that celebrities and political elites actually farm children in underground caves so that they can drink blood
which supposedly staves off aging kunan has become a sort of cult of president trump and in the months since the pandemic it's seen a surge in its appeal the only reason i have this red hat on right now which i still feel like an idiot sometimes wearing it it's because i believe that this is a real thing fake news fake press nick natoli is one of them he discovered kunan about a year and a half ago but he started sharing his views as the pandemic hit the us he can spend up to 16 hours a
day online researching conspiracies jfk was definitely murdered by cia you're taking it from someone who's got jfk on their arm 911 was an inside job people in our government who are working towards a deep state who are trying to keep us controlled children are being harvested children are being farmed for adrenochrome by celebrities and politicians do you subscribe to that not outlandish at all reptilian aliens the um epstein connection mk ultra is a huge one conspiracy overload for me i'm not sure i'm ready for it is there a conspiracy theory that you don't believe in
that's a great question i can't think of it off the top of my head right now but what q anon is is just an amalgamation of all of the greatest conspiracy theories thrown into one big belief i've only been actively posting i'd say for the past couple of months but the response that i've gotten is insane i mean people are online looking for this stuff right now exclusive research seen by the bbc looked at the use of hashtags specific to q and all here's how many posts there were over the two years before the pandemic
and then in march this happened on facebook in just four months membership of the biggest public kunan groups rose by 700 most followers seem to be in the us but there's been a rise in posts from the uk germany and brazil people were looking for that for an answer as to why everything was happening people were also locked down in their homes they were you know stuck to their computers stuck to their phones all day so they had more exposure to this kind of thing online you're an organization that covers extremism so why are you
studying cuny cuban album was was labeled a domestic terror threat by the fbi last year um it was born on platforms that are really associated with white supremacist movements with far-right extremism and although you can't really label cue followers as that the conspiracy is tangential to that side of extremism another site that's seen a huge surge in popularity recently is this page on the message board reddit people are coming here to post about family members that they feel have been sucked into the kunan conspiracy a lot of these relatives are older parents or even grandparents
we've spoken to a few of those who've been posting but we're going to hide their identities because some of their relatives could be quite vulnerable she believes that bill gates created the covet pandemic that coveted 19 is bio warfare that only affects pedophiles and also created the upcoming vaccine bleach is a cure-all which is going to contain microchips to track everybody wacky things such as michelle obama is really a man and people like ellen and j.lo are all satanists and the pedophile rings interdimensional demonic pedophiles i said to him you realize that they believe democrat
politicians and celebrities are literally eating babies and any message back yeah i believe that a lot of this is a fine line between you know heartbreaking and hilarious q anon has an evangelical aspect where followers encourage each other to convert friends and families they call it red pilling a reference from the matrix films update from the trenches keep repelling keep going because it worked it's working it's beautiful some relatives find it especially hard to deal with a q and on belief that the pandemic is a hoax my father is a cancer survivor and he's immunocompromised
this is putting his life at risk if he starts to believe these things too she's 81 and she's not wearing a mask she's not social distancing in any way she implied that my girlfriend's mother who had who had kova at 19 was a predator that's when um i kind of snapped a little bit what do you think of the pandemic i think it's a hoax i think that the the rumor on the street is that president trump is trying to get all these people to go to jail for pedophilia child sacrifice and that the deep
state has control of the media well what if it is real and uh you're not taking it seriously enough do you worry about that you know i don't want anyone to get sick because they went outside without a mask because of me so i always want to stay researched social media companies especially facebook and youtube have been criticized for what's known as the rabbit hole effect that's when their algorithms lead you to content that just gets more and more extreme they say that they're changing but i did a quick search for q anon on my
facebook account and the following day there was a list of q and on pages in my suggestions on tuesday twitter announced that it had started policing q anon content and that it had deleted up to 7 000 accounts this surge of interest in q anon comes as the us gears up for elections in november but it's hard to tell what real-life impact all these hashtags and tweets will have looking closely at some of those who follow q and on now many were right-leaning before but a significant number of those that we've observed had no interest
in politics or even leaned a little to the left they are activating like-minded people who otherwise may be sitting on the sidelines um and i think that's the part of this that's that's actually where it starts to translate into meaningful votes angelo carasoni is the ceo of the left-leaning and anti-trump think tank media matters for america trump retweeted human on dozens of times uh so you know prominent q anon accounts and that's that that has only been increasing in recent weeks and there's a strategy there right because it works up his base um it gets
people energized it's indisputable that he's aware and that he's intentionally using it to his advantage according to media matters at least 14 q on believers could make it to the ballot in november one of them could be elected to congress marjorie greene is in a runoff in georgia in a safe republican seat she's shown her support for cunan on social media in the past we contacted her campaign to find out if she still supports the movement but she didn't respond what is the greater damage that you worry it could do the thing that really scares
me the most about cuis is that it has all the right ingredients for genuine um and sincere and intense violence [Music] for its followers q anon can be all-consuming it's clearly more than a hobby to you what is it to you it's life we're here to take the country back we're not we're not playing around if joe biden wins i'm scared for america because i believe that q anon will have something to say about it and we are large we are strong and where we go one we go all those still on the fringes q
and on is growing and as it does many more families will be left wondering what's happened to the people they love she's going deeper and deeper in like what is that going to look like even six months from now i have to accept that the person i knew as my mother is probably not coming back
