But the social mediacompanies still arent enforcing even the limited restrictions theyve recently put in place to stem the tide of dangerous QAnon material, a review by The Associated Press found.
Both platforms have vowed to stop suggesting QAnon material to users, a powerful way of introducing QAnon to new people.
On Wednesday, hours after a chaotic debate between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, a video from a QAnon account that falsely claimed Biden wore a wire to cheat during the event was trending on Twitter, for example.
Twitter is even still running ads against QAnon material, in effect profiting off the type of tweets that it has vowed to limit. In some cases Facebook is still automatically directing users to follow public and secret QAnon pages or groups, the AP found.
Their algorithm worked to radicalize people and really gave this conspiracy theory a megaphone with which to expand, Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who studies QAnon, said of social platforms. They are responsible for shutting down that megaphone.
QAnon has been linked to real-world violence such as criminal reports of kidnapping and dangerous claims that the coronavirus is a hoax.
Interactions with public Facebook and Instagram posts that included QAnon terms began climbing in March.
By July, they received more attention than at any other point in the last year, according to an AP analysis of data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that helps track material on the platforms.
Are they responsible in some part for QAnons rise because they didnt see the lies and misinformation those people were purveying?
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