OK Y'all want me to write this thread, I guess. I do not want to write this thread, but I guess I gotta.

Here's why QAnon isn't a Russian disinfo campaign.

Here's the conclusion for the impatient: https://mobile.twitter.com/andrewagill/status/1295811713405792259

Let's start off with some things we probably agree with each other about

1 Russia is promoting QAnon
2 Russia is running disinfo campaigns targeted at US politics

But here's where we might disagree

3 Russia didn't create the QAnon conspiracy theory
4 Although the Q account has been run by many people & it's possible 1 or more of those was Russian, none of the foundational mythos came from them

But isn't that just--like--my opinion, man?

In a sense. In the same sense, we don't know the identity of INDIVIDUAL-1 that Michael Cohen conspired with.

But we totally know INDIVIDUAL-1 was Donnie, just as we know QAnon is an American conspiracy theory.

How do we know it's not Russian? There are a few ways. One is that we can compare it to known Russian disinfo campaigns.

For example, Russia did HIV disinfo back in the 80s. Pretty much all of the modern retrospectives mention how believable that was in the wake of Tuskegee.

Oddly enough, I can't find any evidence that Russian narratives linked AIDS & Tuskegee

But that wasn't actually the point I came to make, which is that no matter how the theory linked previous health conspiracies, what it didn't incorporate was Bircherism or JFK assassination

Also note that when I said Tuskegee, you (hopefully) identified that with the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, & not the Airmen or University.

This will be relevant later, but just Person Woman Man Camera TV it for now.

Other Russian-backed disinfo campaigns have been things like CalExit or some anti-immigrant Facebook events.

Again, these are primarily organized around one issue, or one thread of conspiracism. There are reasons for that.

First, foreign influence campaigns are designed to give foreign countries influence over some other country's politics & the way they do that is by controlling a narrative.

A single narrative thread is much easier to control than a sprawling narrative.

At its most basic level, you want to have an easy to control narrative because your goal is to control the narrative.

But also, you don't want one thread of your narrative to get out of control & wind up spreading inside your own country.

Even now, the much more recent Mask Protest movement has had higher IRL impact than QAnon ever has. But the Mask Protests are likely to die out soon, unlike QAnon.

QAnon believers are much more likely to be lifers, which doesn't help foreign influence campaigns, as it means the foreign influencers will have to monitor it for years to come in case it spreads back to their own country.

But on a more logistical level, there's another reason why you wouldn't use a more baroque theory for foreign disinfo.

Every conspiracy theory is like its own language. Regardless of how smart you are, even basic conversations require context you can't get without immersion.

Let me give you an example.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-53808525

I can read every sentence in that article. English is my first language. I have no idea what it's about. What is a "link road?"

I THINK A-roads are backroads but I'm not sure. M-roads are freeways, but I don't have the context I need to figure out what the article is saying.

But it's deeper than that.

Is this part of a larger troubled infrastructure program that 10 Downing Street is running? Or are these long-needed improvements that Bristol fought for? Is Bristol an important hub like Altoona for Central PA?

This is context we all learn by osmosis while living in a culture.

If you're in another country, you'll probably study something like religious practices in the US or Economics of the US or Politics or Folklore.

But it takes years to get fluent in one of these areas, in part because there are so many facets but also because it's a moving target. If you studied US economics, it would have looked dranatically different before & after the Great Recession, or 9/11 or the .com bubble.

Getting fluent takes years, & it's easy to mess it up. Many shibboleths can instantly identify you as an outsider

Famous examples like Houston St. in NYC or Versailles, IL immediately identify outsiders, but there're other examples that you don't hear in conspiracies

Foreign influence campaigns KNOW this & use it to plan their operations. We can see from previous examples that Russian ops tend to be elegant, not convoluted, because increased complexity is increased risk of getting something wrong & being exposed.

I won't belabor the point that more people involved in a conspiracy means it's more likely the theory gets exposed.

I will say that coordinating a conspiracy between 4 or 5 experts in different conspiracies has more risks than just size.

A conspiracy theory like that risks disagreement on narrative but also risks using a phrase that means one thing in one tradition but something incompatible in another.

A single word in passing can carry tremendous totemic importance in a conspiracy. I asked you to "Person Woman Man Camera TV" the word Tuskegee earlier. You should have interpreted that as "Remember this for 5 minutes" because of the recent pop-cultural reference.

If you're coming to this thread 2 years later in another country, it's likely that phrase made no sense because the cultural moment is over. There are things I can make you remember with only a single word or phrase.

Getting these phrases right identifies you as part of the in-group, but getting a single one wrong can push you out immediately.

This is especially true for a conspiracy cult where one of those phrases is "learn the comms."

For example, in researching how Q's opinion of UFOs has changed, I noticed this drop, where completely absent any explicit mention of UFOs, Q knows that's what the question is.

Americans probably knew that, too, given the popularity of shows like Roswell. But would a foreigner?

If you were to ask a stranger in the US what Tunguska means, would they be able to tell you?

So what can we tell about QAnon given these sorts of characteristics?

Ah, yes, QAnon. Remember QAnon? It's a song about QAnon.

The QAnon conspiracy involves a lot of different US conspiracy traditions, including Satanic Panic, Prosperity Gospel, militias, UFOs, Clintons, local US politics, economics, & others.

A foreign agent might be fluent in one 1 or 2 of these areas. An agent fluent in all of these would be placed in a much more highly valuable position. After all, Russians know from experience that they can get the same result from a theory spun from a much simpler source.

So QAnon has all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory created & shaped by people living in the US.

Does it really matter where it comes from? Well, kinda.

Targeting foreign influence campaigns will do a lot to help the US but it won't disrupt Q. OTOH, targeting local Q networks will do much to disrupt its reach

Don't believe me? That's fine. I'm no expert in Q or cults but I've been following QAnon for something like a year or 2

But check out these people who are experts in QAnon. I don't mean to imply that they agree with my assessments but they do agree with the conclusion that Russia's not behind it. https://mobile.twitter.com/andrewagill/status/1295811713405792259