QAnon received earlier boost from Russian accounts on Twitter, archives show
Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts.
Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters.
A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement as it started, early in the previous month.
From November 2017 on, QAnon was the single most frequent hashtag tweeted by accounts that Twitter has since identified as Russian-backed, a Reuters analysis of the archive shows, with the term used some 17,000 times. [Continue reading…]