SCROLL FOR CONSPIRACY
Before her Instagram account was wiped, Rebecca Pfeiffer had 125,000 followers. Like most influencers, her grid was an aspirational window into her world as a successful American lifestyle blogger. Then, there it was, nestled earlier in her feed: a selfie in a baseball cap embroidered with the letter Q. “Humbled daily by your messages of awakening, of truth telling,” Pfeiffer wrote in that caption. It has since been deleted, along with the rest of her account, when in August last year, Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, purged its platform of 790 groups and restricted more than 1950 others as well as 10,000 Instagram accounts posting about the conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Pfeiffer has since created two “backup” accounts to continue espousing her beliefs as a follower of Q.
Q stands for QAnon, a conspiracy theory that first emerged from underground forums such as 4chan and 8chan in 2017. QAnon drew from the platforms’ reputation for extremist beliefs, starting with the popular – albeit widely debunked –
