  The QAnon conspiracy posits that Satan-worshiping Democrats operate a covert
child sex-trafficking operation, which Donald Trump is destined to expose and
annihilate. Emblematic of the ease with which political misconceptions can
spread through social media, QAnon originated in late 2017 and rapidly grew to
shape the political beliefs of millions. To illuminate the process by which a
conspiracy theory spreads, we report two computational studies examining the
social network structure and semantic content of tweets produced by users
central to the early QAnon network on Twitter. Using data mined in the summer
of 2018, we examined over 800,000 tweets about QAnon made by about 100,000
users. The majority of users disseminated rather than produced information,
serving to create an online echochamber. Users appeared to hold a simplistic
mental model in which political events are viewed as a struggle between
antithetical forces-both observed and unobserved-of Good and Evil.
