Figure 1 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Against the backdrop of rising concern over misinformation and disinformation, a growing number of studies have considered the important role played by influential social media accounts when particular news stories attract attention online—with special attention given to Facebook, the most widely-used social network for news. However, little is kno...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... begin by presenting results summarizing the proportion of influential accounts in each major category in each country when we examine accounts identified without any keyword applied (Figure 1). By first focusing on what percentage of influential accounts are associated with media organizations or figures versus political organizations or figures versus other areas when no subject domain has been applied, we establish a baseline for comparisons with the three specific keywords that we focus on in the next part of our findings where we more specifically take up RQ1a and RQ1b. ...
Context 2
... results build on and help contextualize previous findings that have also shown the continued importance of legacy news when it comes to specific topics on Twitter (e.g., Gallagher et al., 2021;Majó-Vázquez et al., 2017), demonstrating similar dynamics extend to Facebook-a platform that is much more widely used, even as much Facebook news use is incidental. At the same time, the considerable variation we found by country and by topic underscores the importance of domain specificity when thinking about how to define the nature of social media influence and the role of news organizations as a force on platforms for driving the public agenda (Heiberger et al., 2021). Furthermore, when we differentiate legacy media from other kinds of media pages and accounts, the former constitute a majority of influential media accounts primarily in the UK and India-at least for news-related subjects-while the latter are more prominent in the US for all subjects. ...
Citations
... To better understand these smaller social media communities and the opportunities and challenges they present for librarians and educators, the authors explored two discrete examples: one influencer on Facebook with a small following of ∼4,000 people, and another influencer on Telegram with a much larger following. Telegram has gained scholarly attention for its unique platform affordances in spreading conspiracy theories (Garry et al., 2021;Walther and McCoy, 2021;Peeters and Willaert, 2022), while Facebook has been explored as a social media platform ideally situated to wield outsized influence on the spread of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation (Yasmin and Spencer, 2020;Innes and Innes, 2021;Oremus and Merrill, 2021;Marko, 2022;Mont'Alverne et al., 2023). Following these scholars, we sought to explore the evolution of the QAnon movement. ...
Introduction
This article explores two QAnon subgroups that were not active during the initial phase of the movement but now epitomize how QAnon has capitalized on social media to reach more people. We examine these smaller communities through the lens of information literacy and other literacies to identify opportunities for librarians and educators.
Results
The communities of conspiracy theorists explored here exhibit information behaviors distinct from the initial QAnon community, presenting opportunities for information professionals to employ new models of information literacy, metaliteracy, and other literacies to combat conspiracy ideation. Notable themes evidenced in both samples include an increasing religiosity affiliated with QAnon, affective states that promote conspiracy ideation, faulty hermeneutics and epistemologies, and specific literacy gaps.
Methods and discussion
We must update our understanding of QAnon and its adherents' shifting priorities and behaviors. Through investigating these smaller subgroups, researchers and educators can address the evolution of the QAnon movement by teaching to literacy gaps and logical fallacies, and acknowledging the troubling emotions that undergird broader belief systems.
