QAnon-Focused Accounts Banned on Twitter Now Flourish — and Get a Boost from Trump — on Truth Social
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Brandon Bell/Getty Donald Trump
Dozens of accounts that were banned from other social media sites for promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory have found a home on Truth Social, the platform created by former President Donald Trump, an apolitical watchdog media organization reports.
NewsGuard, which analyzes and rates news outlets on transparency and credibility, identified 88 Truth Social accounts with more than 10,000 followers each that have promoted slogans, graphics and beliefs associated with QAnon.
Of those accounts, 47 have been verified by Truth Social and 32 were previously banned by Twitter, NewsGuard said in its report, which was released Monday.
QAnon is an evolving collection of conspiracy theories that center on the idea that government, media and financial elites are Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Many followers of QAnon believe that Trump and "Q," an anonymous government official with high-level security clearance, are working to take down the network of famous and powerful child sex-traffickers.
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Trump and other Truth Social executives — including Devin Nunes, a former Republican lawmaker who left the U.S. House of Representatives to become the CEO of Trump's new platform — regularly boost the QAnon-pushing accounts' content.
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In February 2022, after being banned from Twitter following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the former president launched Truth Social. He has 3.9 million followers on the platform, where he's "re-Truthed" (that's the Truth Social equivalent of retweeting) 30 different QAnon-promoting accounts 65 times since he first posted on the site in April, NewsGuard found.
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"He's not simply President Trump the political leader here — he's the proprietor of a platform," Steven Brill, co-chief executive of NewsGuard and founder of The American Lawyer magazine, said, The New York Times reports. "That would be the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg reposting content from supporters of QAnon."
In addition to the Jan. 6 attack, QAnon has been linked to other violent incidents, including an armed standoff at the Hoover Dam in 2018 and Matthew Taylor Coleman's alleged 2021 murders of his 3-year-old son and 11-month-old daughter with a spearfishing gun last year. According to an FBI criminal complaint obtained by PEOPLE, Coleman allegedly told police he was motivated by QAnon.
In 2019, The FBI identified fringe conspiracy theories like QAnon as a domestic terrorist threat.
Before he was banned from Twitter, Trump promoted QAnon content on the platform, though not as often as he's done on Truth Social. On July 4, 2020, he retweeted 14 posts from accounts that supported the conspiracy theory.
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images Jacob Chansley
"I've heard these are people that love our country," then-President Trump said during a White House news conference days later. "So I don't know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me."
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During the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to denounce QAnon during a town hall event with Today anchor Savannah Guthrie.
"Can you just once and for all state that that is completely not true — disavow QAnon?" Guthrie asked Trump.
After saying, "I know nothing about QAnon," he said, "What I do hear about it is they are very strongly against pedophilia — and I agree with that."
Pressed on whether he believed a Satanic pedophile ring was being run by Democrats, Trump said, "I don't know that ... and neither do you know that."
