QAnon and My Life As An Internet Folk Villain
Writer and activist Van Badham discusses how her experience of being trolled, led her to stumble into the depths of the conspiracy theory group, QAnon.
I’ve written a book about the internet as a disinformation weapon. It’s called QAnon and On; A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults.
It’s about the online disinformation movements of Gamergate, Pizzagate and QAnon, and some others. The internet takes the wild, anonymous stories that we used to call “urban myths” and metastases them into full-blown conspiracy theories, forming cult-like communities of believers around them.
My interest in this subject comes from petty, personal experience — namely, that over the years — as a feminist and journalist — I have agglomerated a fact-free reputation as a minor, local internet folk villain.
It sounds like a fun gig, but the pay is terrible and the conditions exhausting. For a start, learning from online conversations things about myself that are not true exacts some mental energy to absorb. The accusation from Neo-Nazis that I beat up a helpless old, uh, fascist at a demo… that was a doozy. So were tales of apparent riches from my casino baron father, who in reality was an RSL club manager too frequently — painfully — out of work. Blood feuds have been declared against me on the basis of how I behaved at parties I didn’t attend, or slights I never expressed, or relationships I was never in, or for pursuing jobs I never wanted.
And yet it’s still the admin that I find most burdensome.
Since I began writing my regular column for the Guardian in 2013, I’ve been truly astounded not only by the stunning rumours but also the time required to process the deluge of love-letters I regularly receive from adoring fans. By “love-letters” I mean, of course, “hate mail” and for “adoring fans” read “people who want me extinguished”.
It’s an iron law of the internet that tits on an opinion brings all the boys to the yard — and those boys themselves bring digital greeting cards with inscriptions like:
I’ll dance on ya grave when ya dead then cos u gonna die before me seen u had the jab
Lol you legit make me sick
You can get fkd
You little shitter
Shut up moron
Mole
These were from a set of a few hundred last week. In this case, my demonic temerity had inspired me to share — on Facebook, no less! — the video of a Jacqui Lambie speech. In it, the maverick Senator had recommended that remaining holdouts get vaccinated against coronavirus. From this, sweet postcards flowed.
In our house, we have a little joke. I say “I got hate mail today” and my partner goes “Ah! It must be a day ending in ‘y’!” and we laugh. I ripple with a moment of existential terror, then I sit down, screencap what’s been said, check the profile of the author and screencap that, too. I have a file to store names and accounts and make a threat assessment. I can’t stop anyone from speaking to me like this, of course — but it’s some comfort to think that if I am “raped by dogs” and left to “die with your throat slit, mole” like some of my admirers promise, the police who find my mutilated body might have a couple of thousand leads to pursue.
It was through the labour of documenting other people’s depth of murderous hatred towards me, a complete stranger, that I first stumbled onto the conspiracy theory, QAnon.
A few years ago, I traced an apocalyptic theme seeping through the timelines of some people who abused me online. They avowed a battle between light and dark, good and evil, heroes and villains with a truly disturbing “Day of the Rope” flavour. The “Day of a Rope” is a far right prophecy associated with various white supremacist and anti-semitic tenets promising believers that all their enemies will swing from a gallows on something like a neofascist Judgment Day. The accounts I stumbled upon appeared to venerate an internet prophet named “Q”, and under Q’s influence were crowd-sourcing a similar day-of-judgment narrative on social media that was far more inclusive than the hoary old white supremacist version. Feminists would face comeuppance, so would Hollywood celebrities and the entire political left. “Elites” were accused of unspeakable crimes, like torturing children for a magical blood product that kept the famous young. They, too, would face tribunals and extradition, sentencing and punishment.
Dark fascination got the better of me, and I’ve spent a year undercover writing a book about these and other internet conspiracists, and the danger their wilful convictions pose to the rest of us.
As an experienced internet villain, I found myself uniquely qualified for this kind of work, and not because inherent nefariousness makes me a particularly good spy or so hypnotic in my dastardliness I can milk secrets from people.
It’s because I’m someone who has seen the facts of their own life rewritten, and how the raw willingness of people to believe what they want to believe allows them to justify hate to themselves. And harassment. And, for some — if only on days ending in ‘y’ — the delicious, tempting thought of violence.
Van Badham is a writer and activist. Her book QAnon and On is out now through Hardie Grant.
