There has been concern about the proliferation of the "QAnon" conspiracy theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative propagated on the world's largest social media platform. Thus, the present research analyzed content generated by 2,813 Facebook pages and groups that contributed to promoting the conspiracy narrative between 2017 and 2020. The result demonstrated that activities of QAnon pages and groups started a significant surge months before the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. We found that these pages and groups increasingly relied on internal sources, i.e., Facebook accounts or their content on the platform, while their dependence on external information sources decreased continuously since 2017. It was also found that QAnon posts based on the Facebook internal sources attracted significantly more shares and comments compared with other QAnon posts. These findings suggest that QAnon pages and groups increasingly isolated themselves from sources outside Facebook while having more internal interactions within the platform, and the endogenous creation and circulation of disinformation might play a significant role in boosting the influence of the misleading narrative within Facebook. The findings imply that the efforts to tackle down disinformation on social media should target not only the cross-platform infiltration of falsehood but also the intra-platform production and propagation of disinformation.
翻译:对Facebook上“QAnon”阴谋论的蔓延一直存在关切,但对于其误导性叙事如何在世界上最大的社交媒体平台上传播却知之甚少,因此,本研究分析了2017年至2020年期间2 813个脸书页面和团体为促进阴谋叙事而制作的内容,结果显示,QAnon网页和团体的活动在2020年美国总统选举前几个月开始大幅激增。我们发现,这些网页和团体日益依赖内部来源,即脸书账户或其在平台上的内容,而自2017年以来,它们对外部信息来源的依赖却持续减少。还发现,基于脸书内部来源的QAnon文章吸引了比其他QAnon文章多得多的股份和评论。这些调查结果表明,QAon网页和团体日益与外部来源隔绝,同时在平台上进行更多的内部互动,内部生成和传播不实信息可能会在加强脸书上误导性叙事的影响方面发挥重大作用。调查结果表明,努力消除社会媒体上的不实信息不仅应针对制作的跨平台,而且还应针对内部信息流化。