  Online discussion platforms offer a forum to strengthen and propagate belief
in misinformed conspiracy theories. Yet, they also offer avenues for conspiracy
theorists to express their doubts and experiences of cognitive dissonance. Such
expressions of dissonance may shed light on who abandons misguided beliefs and
under which circumstances. This paper characterizes self-disclosures of
dissonance about QAnon, a conspiracy theory initiated by a mysterious leader Q
and popularized by their followers, anons in conspiracy theory subreddits. To
understand what dissonance and disbelief mean within conspiracy communities, we
first characterize their social imaginaries, a broad understanding of how
people collectively imagine their social existence. Focusing on 2K posts from
two image boards, 4chan and 8chan, and 1.2 M comments and posts from 12
subreddits dedicated to QAnon, we adopt a mixed methods approach to uncover the
symbolic language representing the movement, expectations, practices, heroes
and foes of the QAnon community. We use these social imaginaries to create a
computational framework for distinguishing belief and dissonance from general
discussion about QAnon. Further, analyzing user engagement with QAnon
conspiracy subreddits, we find that self-disclosures of dissonance correlate
with a significant decrease in user contributions and ultimately with their
departure from the community. We contribute a computational framework for
identifying dissonance self-disclosures and measuring the changes in user
engagement surrounding dissonance. Our work can provide insights into designing
dissonance-based interventions that can potentially dissuade conspiracists from
online conspiracy discussion communities.
