According to a report that was published on Monday, dozens of accounts that support QAnon have moved to Truth Social this year after being banned by other social networks. These accounts have found support from the creator of the platform, who was formerly the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
The media watchdog organization NewsGuard, which evaluates the reliability of news sites, discovered that there were 88 individuals on Truth Social who were pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory to more than 10,000 followers apiece. 32 of the accounts had been suspended or removed by Twitter in the past.
After the incident that occurred at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, Twitter banned Mr. Trump out of concern that he may instigate more bloodshed. In February of 2022, he established Truth Social as an alternate platform. According to the study, he has reposted the messages of 30 different QAnon accounts a total of 65 times since becoming active on the network back in April. This has allowed him to spread the information from those accounts to his more than 3.9 million Truth Social followers.
There are millions of people who follow QAnon who think that the government is being controlled by a conspiracy of leftists who worship Satan and engage in sex trafficking, and that Mr. Trump is leading the charge against this conspiracy. Despite the fact that some QAnon followers have been unsuccessful at the polls, the fantastical notions of QAnon have taken root in the mainstream of Republican politics.
The movement was related to the disturbance that took place in the Capitol, which led law authorities to see it as a possible danger of domestic terrorism. Tech firms including as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch have taken measures to restrict access to material associated with QAnon.
In the past, on a single afternoon in the year 2020, Mr. Trump retweeted more than a dozen tweets that were sent by accounts that promoted QAnon. Soon after that, when speaking about those who believe in conspiracies, he said that he had “heard these are folks who love our nation.”
One user with more than 31,000 followers and three Qs in his profile name uploaded a picture of Donald Trump seated on a throne with a crown and a Q symbol behind him on Truth Social in May. The user’s profile name also had three Qs. The photograph was shared again by Mr. Trump.
Additionally, Mr. Trump has boosted tweets that featured the QAnon motto WWG1WGA (which stands for “where we go one, we go all”) and that referenced to a “storm,” which is a term for the mass arrests that the QAnon devout think would be utilized to smash the deep state. According to the article, further tweets that were subsequently endorsed by Mr. Trump included a call for “civil war” and allegations that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, was a “coup.” Both of these claims were false.
Ricky Shiffer, the individual who was shot and killed by the police last month when he attempted to get into the F.B.I. headquarters in Cincinnati, had also communicated using the same account.
47 of the QAnon accounts that have been identified by NewsGuard as being on Truth Social have red verification badges. The platform claims that it only gives these badges to “VIPs” who have “an account of public importance.” According to Data.ai, a company that tracks the activity in app stores, the application Truth Social has been downloaded three million times in the United States on Apple iOS devices up to the 26th of August.
On the Truth Social network, executives and backers of Truth Social have also engaged in conversation with QAnon fans. Devin Nunes, a Republican from California who served in Congress for 19 years before stepping down to become the chief executive of Truth Social, often interacted with and tagged the account @Q. According to NewsGuard, the user behind the account, which has more than 218,000 followers, has used terms like “trust the plan” and others that are linked with the conspiracy theory.
In order to launch Truth Social, Mr. Trump collaborated with the business Digital World Acquisition, which is a corporation that specializes in acquisitions. According to the article, Patrick Orlando, the chief executive of Digital World, has also republished QAnon catchphrases for his almost 10,000 followers on the network. A spokesman for Mr. Orlando dismissed the claim as being “false and defamatory.”