The QAnon Among Us

Hi all, it's Eric. Facebook Inc. shocked the world this week when it actually took substantive action against a noxious conspiracy theory on its platform. Less than two months after shutting down about 3,000 QAnon groups pages that flirted with violence, on Tuesday the company banned the group from its platform altogether.

The about-face was in equal parts mystifying and gratifying. In August, Facebook removed hundreds of the most extreme QAnon groups as part of a broader sweep of troubling American Facebook pages that used violent language, including far-right militia groups. But QAnon didn’t go away. The movement wrapped itself in the more innocuous sounding #SaveTheChildren hashtag, while becoming a source for dangerous conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.