Facebook's recent decisions raise a really interesting question: what is QAnon?

Is it an organization? A movement? A religion? Facebook is treating it as a "dangerous organization", a category that includes Islamic and white supremacist terror groups, which doesn't totally fit. https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1313605406061744131

One of the key people in shaping Facebook's thinking on handling violent groups was @brianfishman, an expert in ISIS who was hired from West Point, and who wrote the defining article on the use of the internet by terrorist groups. https://tnsr.org/2019/02/crossroads-counter-terrorism-and-the-internet/

In this article (and in a lecture he generously gave to my class), Brian laid out seven uses for internet platforms by terrorist groups:

Content Hosting
Audience Development
Brand Control
Secure Communication
Community Maintenance
Financing
Information Collection and Curation

Not all groups need all seven, and almost nobody uses one platform for these. At it's zenith, ISIS used a variety of drop sites for content hosting, Telegram for secure communication and community maintenance, and Twitter, Facebook and other big platforms for audience dev.

There are a lot of differences between ISIS and QAnon, obviously. ISIS was much more violent (much of which seemed far away to the US), held territory and had a real command structure. They cared deeply about brand control, while Q now has many conflicting influencers (Q Drops).

But there is a key similarity: the use of multiple platforms for various purposes. ISIS used Telegram and some lesser known tools for communication, coordination and message development. They then sent emissaries to recruit from FB/TW/YT using watered-down dogma, much like QAnon.

So will the platforms be as effective suppressing QAnon as they were ISIS, one of the few really successful platform collaborations of the last five years? Probably not, as a key difference is that QAnon membership is not illegal and there is no gov pressure on the core group.

While big tech was limiting ISIS's online reach, leaders were being arrested or killed and their C2 infiltrated. At one point, it seemed like the majority of users on key Telegram channels were western intelligence agents, private intel companies, or tech anti-terrorism teams.

QAnon will continue to have a large and thriving presence on the small platforms where it started (which I shall not name here) as well as some of the alt-right social network competitors that have sprung up.

Since they care little of brand control, they will happily dilute the message to recruit normies from the big platforms to the sites where they operate openly. This will put the platforms under pressure to censor a larger and larger set of phrases and shibboleths.

Tech companies will need to consider if they want to coordinate their response, as they did with ISIS and GIFCT. This raises really important "content cartel" questions as @evelyndouek has documented. All this against a background of tech hearings by Q-adjacent legislators.

Anyway, this isn't an easy case but the start of a long battle, and the people who only ever ask the platforms to "Do more!" should consider the limits they would put on that ask.

I'm looking forward to Brian's follow-up article on QAnon one day.