Abstract
This study concerns the rhetoric of the QAnon conspiracy theory as it appears on Twitter, and compares that rhetoric to that of mainstream conservatives on the same platform. By coding individual tweets' content for specific instances of violent, religious, economic, or paranoid rhetoric, and comparing samples of both of these populations, the study aims to determine what differences there are between the QAnon community's uses of rhetoric, particularly violent rhetoric, and that of the mainstream conservative community. The results demonstrate that the QAnon movement is more likely to use violent terminology in their tweets, but is not able to find strong correlations between violent rhetoric and other forms of speech, such as paranoia or religiosity. Likewise, the QAnon movement frequently focuses on ritualistic cults or on accusations of satanism, but not in sufficient numbers to demonstrate a correlation between such accusations and violence.
Recommended Citation
Planck, Samuel
(2020)
"Where We Go One, We Go All: QAnon and Violent Rhetoric on Twitter,"
Locus: The Seton Hall Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 3, Article 11.
Available at:
https://scholarship.shu.edu/locus/vol3/iss1/11