Let us know below why and with whom you want to join the Golden Circle. We will send instructions to reset No.”. “It’s a potentially dangerous belief; it’s very disconnected from reality; I don’t really think we want more people getting into it,” he said of QAnon. Valid or not, America has slid down a rabbit hole where some lawmakers and citizens question the integrity of voting. “That’s a lot of money, it turns out,” he said. 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. “What would it do to smaller ones?”, For example, “I think they had a plan to put the Singapore dollar into the Libra reserve at some point,” he said. Down The Rabbit Hole is allowed to give away 2 Golden Circle tickets on Facebook, allowing the band to see you at home and virtually get you into the show. 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. It has a tiny currency. In early May, QAnon braced for a purge. Nothing is as it seems at Down The Rabbit Hole Cupcakery. “I really do not think that QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the affordances of Facebook.”. Down The Rabbit Hole Theatre Co., Ridgeway Ontario. “Everything about our research suggests that these people are not irrational; they’re hyper-literate, even if they’ve come to beliefs that are empirically inaccurate ,” Partin said. “Therefore, when Facebook brought this Libra scheme out, with all of these esoteric ideas that most people didn’t understand,” regulators were not exactly pleased. 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. McDermott: Hawley's populist demagoguery is a smoother form of Trumpism. David also pointed out that Libra could have been particularly dangerous for countries with particularly small and fragile economies. Q, whose cryptic messages and predictions claimed to be based on a high-level government security clearance, quickly decamped from 4chan to the even more extreme 8chan, where believers could read Q’s latest “crumbs” directly from the source. Reddit had been central to the development of the QAnon movement, which began in October 2017 with the emergence of “Q” on 4chan, the anarchic image board that has served as a launching pad for memes and internet culture but also racist extremism and harassment campaigns. Bring your friends, family, or co-workers, and test your problem solving skills, by solving clues, riddles, and codes, in our unique themed rooms Escape in the fastest time to earn bragging rights and avoid the wall of shame! 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. It had also long enjoyed and at times even earned a reputation as one of the danker cesspools of the social web, for years tolerating communities known as “subreddits” dedicated to sharing non-consensual sexualized images of women or advocating rape. Despite the amount of mainstream media attention that Libra got around the time of its launch, David said that he believes that “Libra is not taken as seriously as seriously as it should be in the cryptocurrency world.” After all, “it was started by four Bitcoiners,” he continued. It appears that anti-vaccine propagandists are also taking notice, and attempting to capitalize. Terms, Cookies and Privacy Notice. Libra’s entrance onto the global scene was made with the “move fast and break things” bravura that Facebook has become known for. Memes, videos and posts are often bigoted and disconnected from reality, but not all that different from the content that is shared in non-QAnon, pro-Trump Facebook groups. And given the current state of the financial landscape across the globe, Libra could have easily become massive. McDermott: Today's GOP 'leaders' are following their base right down the rabbit hole. Down the Rabbit Hole Outlandish! “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.”. “That’s partly because they have a fundamentally different epistemology to judge what is true and false.”. Cook has begun referencing the “deep state” and stoking fear of forced vaccination and “FEMA camps”. Do let us know and we'd be happy to check ourselves and fix if necessary. 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. 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. 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. Social media bans are often difficult to maintain, but Reddit’s move was uncommonly effective. 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. To enact a blanket ban akin to Reddit’s under its current rubric of rules, Facebook would likely have to designate QAnon as a “dangerous organization” – the category it uses to ban both terrorist and hate groups and any content published in support or praise of them. “They’ve misbehaved in so many ways, and they’ve broken people’s trust repeatedly,” David said. “But there is resiliency built in. I always get a reply back within the hour, (which is unheard of in other groups). “The regulators looked at Facebook’s plans and said, ‘you are not doing this,’” David explained. David pointed out that France’s Minister of the Economy and Finance, Bruno le Maire, who happened to be in the middle of a live interview when the announcement was published, responded negatively to Libra literally “within minutes” of its first public appearance. 1.5K likes. To hear Finance Magnates’ full interview with David Gerard, visit us on Soundcloud or Youtube. The plan was that the interest in this reserve pile would be used to pay for the operational costs of the Libra network. Facebook had removed a small subset – five pages, six groups and 20 profiles – of the community on the social network, and as word of the bans spread, followers of Q began preparing for a broader sweep. Friedberg worried that it may already be too late. “It’s an incitement to violence.”. But the violent anger of adherents to QAnon crossed the line for Reddit in less than a year. 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. 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. 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. Facebook has been reluctant to appear in any way biased against Republicans, and if (or when) QAnon reaches Congress, it will be even more politically difficult for Facebook to take a stand. An Emporium of delights! In 2017, David published his first book on the crypto space, dubbed Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts. “When a common sense of what is real and what is correct breaks apart, it becomes nearly impossible to reach a democratic consensus.”. The list of more than 100 QAnon groups and accounts was then generated by following Facebook’s recommendation algorithms and using simple keyword searches. “Singapore’s a tiny country. And while YouTube and Twitter have played an important role in providing a broadcast platform for QAnon content, the specific structures provided by Facebook are uniquely suited to the participatory “work” of engaging with QAnon. While QAnon thrives on Facebook, another social media site took timely and decisive action against it. Indeed, there have been numerous incidents of real-world violence linked to QAnon, and in May 2019, the FBI identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat in an intelligence bulletin. 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. He slid down a rabbit hole last night on the internet. “Do the internet companies bear some responsibility? 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. But Q is the first such figure to have achieved such a broad audience and real-world political influence. 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. Thank you for registering to Finance Magnates. Down The Rabbit Hole Theatre Co. is a start-up theatre company out of Ridgeway Ontario Canada. 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. Two days later, in a post that included a collage of dozens of news headlines about the takedowns, Q went further, speculating that there had been a “coordinated media roll-out designed to instill ‘fear’” in believers and dissuade them from discussing QAnon on social media. It’s a massive, massive amount of power for the US. In May, Republican voters in Oregon nominated a QAnon believer to run for the US Senate in November. “Otherwise, the whole financial system would have collapsed.”. Leave your name/email (not required) if you'd like to be contacted about this story (will not be disclosed): Be it a typo or a factual error - we do our best but we are also human! “What if all of those people get into Libra?”, After all, “Facebook would like them [to be a part of Libra.] Please open the email we sent you and click on the link to verify your account. Would it be better if they took it down? 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. “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. Facebook had. This points to another of the regulators’ fears about what Libra could have done: the “Libra-ization” of everything. Today that group has grown to more than 90,000 members. What's Down The Rabbit Hole ? That's dangerous. Down the Rabbit Hole with David Gerard. 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. Because we know how to move numbers on a computer, and Libra would have to be a part of the financial system if it was going to work with ‘real money’.”. Instead, QAnon groups on Facebook have continued to grow at a considerable pace in the weeks following the takedown, with several adding more than 10,000 members over 30 days. She searches for everything I ask and her prices are super fair. For example, “when he says that Facebook’s ‘Novi’ wallet will not leak your personal information to the advertising engine, I don’t doubt his sincerity.”. “The 2008 crisis seriously affected the United States, which has one of the biggest and healthiest economies in the world,” he said. 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. Other politicians and government officials quickly followed suit. Indeed, almost as soon as Libra appeared, a massive regulatory outcry began. Over the course of reporting this article – about one month – the aggregate membership of the documented groups and pages grew from 2.75m to more than 3m, or approximately 8.5%. “So, when Facebook walked up with the Libra whitepaper, which basically had the same plan that led to the 2008 financial crisis, regulators weren’t happy with it.”, David called the whole thing “bizarre”: after all, “they have an economist, Christian Catalini. your password. Enter your email address below. 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. The Instagram accounts were discovered by searching for “QAnon” in the app’s discovery page and then following Instagram’s algorithmic recommendations. “[…] You can’t expect governments to really welcome that.”, Finance Magnates is a global B2B provider of multi-asset trading news, research and events I will be a long time customer for sure. “If you’re tiny, regulators just nod and smile and say, ‘that’s ok, just don’t break any laws.’ And then they break the laws, and the Securities and Exchange Commission fines them.”, However, “when you’re Facebook,” it is another story: “Facebook has two billion users,” David said. “If Facebook flipped a switch and every Q post disappeared tomorrow, that probably would be harmful for QAnon,” he said. 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. “The only way that blockchains are a better remittance channel than what’s traditionally available is when you’re not worrying about regulation at either end. FMTV: David Gerard, author of “Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money”, DeFi, "Money Legos," & Decentralized Identity: A Chat with Ontology, Why is US Crypto Policy So Important? with special focus on electronic trading, banking, and investing.Copyright © 2020 "Finance Magnates Ltd." All rights reserved. We do not store your information and we do not disclose our sources. “Libra was actually thinking in terms of people using Libra tokens instead of their local currency,” David explained. 2.9K likes. Probably. QAnon is a movement of people who interpret as a kind of gospel the online messages of the anonymous figure, ‘Q’. David is known as a crypto sceptic, blockchain pundit, and the author of cryptocurrency and blockchain news site Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. “Once I started liking those pages and joining those groups, Facebook just started recommending more and more and more and more, to the point where I was afraid to like them all in case Facebook would flag me as a bot,” said Friedberg. 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. 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. 119 were here. And he’s concerned about the free speech implications of censorship by tech platforms. To Friedberg, the window for Facebook to act on QAnon may have already passed. This is largely due to the activism of three dedicated conspiracy theorists who latched on to Q’s posts in the early days, according to an investigation by NBC News. Moreover, Facebook is not merely providing a platform to QAnon groups. Its powerful algorithms are actively recommending them to users who may not otherwise have been exposed to them. After all, “it’s ok if you’re tiny and you’re economically illiterate,” he continued. He regularly polls conspiracy theories and consistently finds that QAnon is “one of the least believed things” out there, well below belief in theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death, anti-vaccine hoaxes, and Holocaust denialism. “I’m starting to wonder if we’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop – another act of violence,” he said. WWG1WGA is a QAnon catchphrase. “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. Instead, Facebook’s algorithms recommended a QAnon group to a Guardian reporter’s account after it had joined pro-Trump, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown Facebook groups. Groups and pages that the Guardian had documented to have been promoted through Facebook’s recommendation algorithms grew 19.9%. The Guardian also continued to receive recommendations to join additional QAnon groups after its initial query to Facebook. Let the games begin — Review: Alice in Borderland takes us down a deliciously bonkers rabbit hole Alice in Wonderland and Ready Player One meet Lord of … 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. Reddit was significantly easier to use for the kind of crowd-sourced research and interpretation that forms the core of participation in QAnon, and the site was host to a large pool of potential recruits, such as the 1.2m members of the subreddit r/conspiracy. QAnon did not disappear after Reddit pulled the plug, however. Down The Rabbit Hole.Kefalonia, Argostólion, Greece. In each episode we explore the science and spirituality of human consciousness and the very nature of our existence, with scientists and spiritual leaders from many walks of life. But, the story is much more complicated and interesting than that. A prominent anti-vaccine propagandist appeals to QAnon followers. “The pic has been taken down but the message was received!”, Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories, Republican QAnon conspiracy promoter picked to run for US Senate. The novelist Mark Twain tumbles down the rabbit hole of extremism. Meanwhile, “they hadn’t finished their software, and they hadn’t finished their economic plan, but they decided to release them anyway.”, Are Alternative Payment Methods the New Banking King?Go to article >>. “It’s a weird little story,” David said. ”enough to actually affect economies.”, David also pointed out that the plans for Libra in its early stages closely resembled “a money market fund,” in other words, “the things that were so popular in 2008, like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Thursday 6 August at 15 pm we'll let you know who the winners are. The uniformity of the response was amazing.”. David also commented on the public perception of the individual leaders involved with the Libra project. But, he somehow missed that Libra’s plan recreated the conditions that caused the 2008 financial crisis.”, Not to mention “all the regulation stuff,” David continued. Some groups changed their names, substituting “17” for “Q” (the 17th letter of the alphabet); others shared links to back-up accounts on alternative social media platforms with looser rules. QAnon evolved out of the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which posited that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza restaurant, and has come to incorporate numerous strands of rightwing conspiracy mongering. Erin Gallagher, a researcher who studies social media extremism, said she was also encouraged to join a QAnon group by Facebook, soon after joining an anti-lockdown group. 112 were here. Despite this, Uscinski is skeptical of the idea that kicking QAnon off Facebook would help anyone. The life of Libra is a complex tale; we asked David to start at the very beginning. For more information, read our Dedicated followers interpret Q’s cryptic messages in a kind of digital scavenger hunt. He’s an academic economist; he’s not foolish, he’s not uneducated. 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.”. “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. 2.9K likes. They were thinking about a big plan from the beginning when Morgan Beller was initially telling everyone about this thing, she was saying things like, ‘how can we apply blockchain technology to our user base of two billion people?’”. I love Down the Rabbit Hole! “You can mechanically take those steps,” he said. Her glitter is so sparkly and pretty and to top it off, the customer service is beyond amazing! More than just another internet conspiracy theory, QAnon is a movement of people who interpret as a kind of gospel the online messages of an anonymous figure – “Q” – who claims knowledge of a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles and sex traffickers. “Last month, we took down accounts, Groups, and Pages tied to this conspiracy theorist movement for violating our policies,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. Instead, its believers moved on to other platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Discord and – crucially – Facebook. And you can’t really do that, it turns out.”, For example, “they did ‘super-safe investments’ that turned out to be based on, say, mortgages, and then some of those mortgages went bad; this then led to the investments collapsing, and then the money market funds collapsing, and therefore, the people relying on the money market funds collapsing.”, What happened then? 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. “It’s full of Bitcoin and blockchain ‘world ideas,’” including “all of the amazing promises that people make about cryptocurrency: it’ll solve inequality; you can do remittances with it and it’ll bank the unbanked, and all of that sort of thing,” David said. “When do you expend ammunition?” Q wrote. Therefore, regulators around the world, and particularly in the United States, feared that Libra could overtake the dollar’s role as the default international currency. Receiving QAnon recommendations from Facebook does not appear to be that uncommon. The company also claimed that “all of the Pages” and “the vast majority of Groups” documented by the Guardian had been removed from recommendation algorithms prior to the Guardian’s query. Despite the fact that Q’s prognostications have reliably failed to come true, followers rationalize the inaccuracies as part of a larger plan. Facebook’s algorithms appear to have detected this synergy between the QAnon and anti-vaccine communities. 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. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. In total, the documented pages, groups and accounts count more than 3m aggregate followers and members, though there is likely significant overlap among these groups and accounts. Down The Rabbit Hole.Kefalonia, Argostólion, Greece. Please check your inbox for our authentication email. Much of what is shared in QAnon groups on Facebook is a mix of pro-Trump political speech and pro-Trump political misinformation. Anonymous internet posters claiming to be high-level government officials are not entirely uncommon; in recent years, other so-called “anons” have emerged with claims that they were revealing secrets from inside the FBI or CIA.