Dozens of accounts promoting QAnon flocked to Truth Social this year after being banned by other social networks and finding support from the platform’s creator, former President Donald Trump, according to a report released Monday.
NewsGuard, a media watchdog that analyzes media credibility, found 88 users promoting the conspiracy theory on Truth Social — one for every 10,000+ followers. Of those accounts, 32 had been banned from Twitter.
The platform blocked Trump for fear that he might return to inciting violence after his supporters invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the former president created Truth Social as an alternative in February 2022. On the new network, he expanded content from 30 QAnon accounts to its more than 3.9 million followers, reposting messages 65 times since April, according to the report.
“He’s not just the political leader Trump here — he’s the owner of the platform,” says Steven Brill, director of NewsGuard and founder of The American Lawyer magazine. “It would be the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg republishing conspiratorial content.”
Millions of QAnon followers believe that an imaginary group of sex traffickers and devil-worshipping liberals is controlling the government and that Trump is leading the fight against it. The outlandish ideas took root in wings of the Republican Party, and the group’s move was seen by police as a potential domestic terrorist threat linked to the Capitol riot.
Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitch have cracked down on QAnon content. “Other platforms have taken steps to address this and other types of misinformation, but at Truth Social it’s pretty clear that wasn’t the case,” says Brill.
Trump’s platform did not respond to questions about the NewsGuard report. In a statement, he said he had “reopened the internet and given the American people a voice again.”
Before being banned from Twitter, the former president even republished more than a dozen posts from accounts promoting QAnon in a single afternoon in 2020. Soon after, talking about conspiracy theorists, he claimed to have heard that “these are people who love our country”.
On Truth Social, a user with more than 31,000 followers and three Qs to his profile name posted in May an image of Trump sitting on a throne with a crown and Q emblem behind him. The former president republished the image.
Trump also amplified messages that included QAnon’s slogan WWG1WGA (where we go one, we all go) and which referred to a “storm” — a description of the mass arrests that QAnon loyalists believe will be used to destroy the deep state. Others, according to the report, included an appeal to “civil war” and claims that the 2020 presidential election was a coup – a thesis defended until today by Trump, always without evidence, and already refuted by the courts.
The Republican also shared messages at least a dozen times from an account that posted about the “storm” and “a war on sex traffickers and pedophiles” to his more than 36,000 followers. Ricky Shiffer, a man killed by police this month after trying to break into the FBI’s Cincinnati office, became involved with the same account.
Of the QAnon accounts identified on Truth Social by NewsGuard, 47 have red verification badges, which the platform says it reserves for VIPs as they are in the “public interest”. The network’s app was downloaded 3 million times in the US on iOS systems until August 26.
Truth Social executives and supporters also interacted with QAnon supporters on the platform. Devin Nunes, a California Republican who resigned from Congress after 19 years to become CEO of the network, regularly tagged the @Q profile and engaged with it. The account, which has more than 218,000 followers, used phrases associated with the conspiracy theory, such as “trust the plan”.
Trump has teamed up with Digital World Acquisition to start Truth Social. Company CEO Patrick Orlando also reposted QAnon catchphrases to his nearly 10,000 followers, according to the report — which an Orlando representative described as a false and defamatory accusation.
“Orlando doesn’t follow or pay attention to QAnon,” Adam L. Schwartz said in an email. “And he has no idea what constitutes so-called ‘common QAnon slogans’.”
