There's a new doc on Netflix that is well worth your time: The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem looks at one of the most toxic and destructive corners of the internet.
From Variety:
[The Antisocial Network is] about 4Chan, the popular imageboard website that became the Petri dish in which QAnon — the mother of all crackpot conspiracy theories — came into being.
QAnon is clearly a virus that spread like wildfire through the body politic and we don't seem to have any way to inoculate our society against it. But the symbiosis with Trump and his nasty tweets was particularly trickster-y and I was not aware of this claim:
One of the things that lent Q credibility is that he would tweet out a message, and 10 minutes later it would be echoed in a Trump tweet. How could that happen? The documentary reveals how: The Q tweet was actually done after the Trump tweet, and simply mimicked it — but the timecode on the tweet was altered, to make it look like Trump was taking his cues from Q. That's called basic deepfake Internet flimflam. But it worked. It fooled people. The 4Chan programmers got their viral sensation and their jollies.
A lot of these people claim to be hacktivists but it feels more like they are just disaffected assholes who want to burn it all down and laugh while it burns.
Previously: Heartbreaking visit to a delusional Qanon family
