QAnon

QAnon is a conspiracy movement organized around anonymous posts, signed “Q”, claiming to come from a government official with high-level clearance. The first such post appeared on 4chan’s /pol/ board on October 28, 2017, predicting that Hillary Clinton would be arrested within days. The prediction did not occur, and the posting continued.

Spread

Amarasingam and Argentino, writing in the Combating Terrorism Center’s CTC Sentinel, document that the posts would likely have remained obscure had a small number of accounts with existing audiences not promoted them off the imageboards. The posting account moved from 4chan to 8chan, and to 8kun after 8chan was taken offline in 2019.

Public awareness grew sharply during 2020. Pew Research Center recorded 23% of U.S. adults saying they had heard at least a little about QAnon in February 2020 and 47% by September of that year.

Measuring adherence

There is no membership to count, and prevalence figures depend entirely on how the question is asked. PRRI’s 2021 survey with the Interfaith Youth Core reported that 14% of Americans agreed with a set of three statements drawn from QAnon claims — that government and media are controlled by a cabal, that a coming “storm” will remove it, and that violence may be necessary. That figure describes agreement with those statements; it is not a count of people who identify with QAnon, and it should not be read as one.

Documented incidents

CTC Sentinel catalogues individual criminal cases in which the defendant’s stated motive referenced QAnon claims, including an armed standoff near the Hoover Dam in 2018 and several arrests in 2020. These are individual acts by people who invoked the conspiracy theory; the article treats the security question as open rather than settled, and its title poses it as a question.