  There has been concern about the proliferation of the "QAnon" conspiracy
theory on Facebook, but little is known about how its misleading narrative
propagated on the world's largest social media platform. Thus, the present
research analyzed content generated by 2,813 Facebook pages and groups that
contributed to promoting the conspiracy narrative between 2017 and 2020. The
result demonstrated that activities of QAnon pages and groups started a
significant surge months before the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. We found
that these pages and groups increasingly relied on internal sources, i.e.,
Facebook accounts or their content on the platform, while their dependence on
external information sources decreased continuously since 2017. It was also
found that QAnon posts based on the Facebook internal sources attracted
significantly more shares and comments compared with other QAnon posts. These
findings suggest that QAnon pages and groups increasingly isolated themselves
from sources outside Facebook while having more internal interactions within
the platform, and the endogenous creation and circulation of disinformation
might play a significant role in boosting the influence of the misleading
narrative within Facebook. The findings imply that the efforts to tackle down
disinformation on social media should target not only the cross-platform
infiltration of falsehood but also the intra-platform production and
propagation of disinformation.
