Characterizing Reddit Participation of Users Who Engage in the QAnon Conspiracy Theories

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit users involved in QAnon conspiracy theories, revealing their activity patterns, community engagement, and the potential spread of low-quality information, with implications for platform moderation.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale, data-driven characterization of QAnon-related user behavior on Reddit, highlighting cross-community participation and content quality issues.

Findings

Most users became active after QAnon emergence and declined post-2018 ban.

Users participated across diverse subreddits, often unrelated to QAnon.

Majority of shared links originated from low-quality sources.

Abstract

Widespread conspiracy theories may significantly impact our society. This paper focuses on the QAnon conspiracy theory, a consequential conspiracy theory that started on and disseminated successfully through social media. Our work characterizes how Reddit users who have participated in QAnon-focused subreddits engage in activities on the platform, especially outside their own communities. Using a large-scale Reddit moderation action against QAnon-related activities in 2018 as the source, we identified 13,000 users active in the early QAnon communities. We collected the 2.1 million submissions and 10.8 million comments posted by these users across all of Reddit from October 2016 to January 2021. The majority of these users were only active after the emergence of the QAnon Conspiracy theory and decreased in activity after Reddit's 2018 QAnon ban. A qualitative analysis of a sample of 915 subreddits where the "QAnon-enthusiastic" users were especially active shows that they participated in a diverse range of subreddits, often of unrelated topics to QAnon. However, most of the users' submissions were concentrated in subreddits that have sympathetic attitudes towards the conspiracy theory, characterized by discussions that were pro-Trump, or emphasized unconstricted behavior (often anti-establishment and anti-interventionist). Further study of a sample of 1,571 of these submissions indicates that most consist of links from low-quality sources, bringing potential harm to the broader Reddit community. These results point to the likelihood that the activities of early QAnon users on Reddit were dedicated and committed to the conspiracy, providing implications on both platform moderation design and future research.