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Sep 16, 2020

1/ Thread on QAnon hijacking Save the/our Children Facebook. I identifed 61 groups that have branded themselves as anti-child trafficking pages or organization; in reality they are predominantly QAnon pages sharing fall cabal, out of shadows, & pedowood videos, as well as Qdrops

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2/ Using

@crowdtangle

aggregate membership on September 16 was ~330K and a week later it is at 505k this represents growth of 3,028.66% since July 2020. The spike in the community started the week of July 26th

9:21 PM · Sep 23, 2020

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3/ Since the start of the year there have been 140k posts in these communities, though most of these have taken place since July 2020 with 116k (8643 posts/week)

4/ A similar trend can be seen with interaction rates as there have been 9.22M interaction since Janurary 2020, though 8.95M of these (663k per week) have occured since July 2020.

5/ One telling element in the graphs above is that, though membership is up activity is on a downward trend. Telling of this is the "shares" of content from this groups which is a good indication of community activity.

6/ It is very likely that the "save the/our children" narratives are not going to be sustained long term without some injection of content to feed the communities here. It is hard to determine if this has anything to do with measures put in place by Facebook at this time.

7/Popular content shared in these communities is Fall Cabal, Out of Shadows, Pizzagate and Frazzeldrip videos. When looking at google analytics around this content we see that CT peaks and valleys match up with google analytics for web searches and YouTube searches of these terms

8/ These groups have driven a fair amount of traffic to these QAnon/ QAnon adjacent videos in July and August. Traffic to most of this content had died down prior to the save our/the children takeover.

9/ with the exception of Pizzagate which has seen a resurgence since it made headway into TikTok communities and reintroduced itself to a new young audience that had never heard of it before

10/ Some of these communities have some concerning patterns of behaviors: there is some doxxing of people that "look like pedophiles", or who people claim are pedophiles without evidence, there are calls to harass them on social media and at home.

11/ Now QAnon communities have a terrible reputation at doing research so it is unlikely these people they are targeting are actually pedophiles or criminals. and even if they were there are actual channels that are to be used for such things.

12/ However, there are some groups that provide the information for the proper channels and ask members in these groups to flood the hotlines and email boxes with requests. Again with QAnon's poor research skills this is draining resources away from real and important tips

13/ There is also an increase in the call for violence against pedophiles, which again with QAnon's poor research reputation, in a rare circumstance put an innocent individuals life at risk

14/ There are also some groups that are pretending to be CSOs or NGO working against child trafficking and soliciting donations, though they do not appear to be any real org based on some searches I did quickly yesterday. If this is the case, this is egregious behavior.

15/ Now there has been an increase in pro-life content and discussing about saving all children being about not only trafficked ones but also unborn ones, esp. since the death of RBG. This has been very popular in the christian communities obviously.

16/ there is a possibility that part of this community may shift away from QAnon and into more of the christian/pro-life communities or a symbiosis of QAnon with christian/pro-life communities. This is something to keep an eye on as I am seeing hints of it.