A Conspiracy of Lost Content

The Case of ”Q” and QAnon

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33063/tabm.v8i1.345

Keywords:

QAnon, digital preservation, interlinked content, kickbanning, social media

Abstract

From November 2017, the mystical anonymous poster ”Q” filled its followers with messages regarding American politics. Q posted on different image boards and as the number of followers grew different web pages were created where canonical Q-posts (usually called ”drops” or Q-drops”) were preserved, numbered, tagged, and interlinked. The QAnons – the movement formed around the messages from Q – were fierce online discussants occupying almost every possible social media platform. The questions are – Will this corpus exist for future researchers? How do we preserve the content of a deplatformed movement? What are the limits of digital preservation of interlinked content created by a community?

Author Biography

Rikard Friberg von Sydow, Södertörn University

Dr Rikard Friberg von Sydow is Senior Lecturer in Archival Science and Head of the department of Archival Science and Library and Information Science at Södertörn University, Stockholm. His research focuses, among other things, on the history of information management and on studies of internet culture, especially in its more extreme forms.

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Published

2023-12-18

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2023): Tidskrift för ABM Special issue

Section

Peer-reviewed articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Rikard Friberg von Sydow

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.