When the pandemic hit last March, 27-year-old Jennifer*, a childcare worker from Virginia, was furloughed from her job, leaving her with little to do but curl up anxiously on her couch with her phone. She’d spend hours a day scrolling through Facebook and Instagram posts about self-healing, spirituality, and trauma, mostly by wellness types she followed after getting interested in natural medicine a few years back. (“We seemed to be on the same journey,” Jennifer says of her online community. “I’d built up almost a trust with them.”)
But then a new kind of post started appearing in her feed: graphics “in pretty fonts with pretty colors” encouraging her to “Trust the Plan” or to be prepared that “Light Is Coming to Dark.” They were accompanied by an increasing number of posts (all misleading or false) on how COVID-19 was overblown, a hoax, or part of a government scheme to microchip everyone with a vaccine.
To Jennifer, these posts raised “innocent questions”—the kind that the online wellness community had always posed about mainstream health and medical narratives. “They were always like, ‘Put on your critical-thinking hats; this doesn’t make sense,’” she says. “I was in this vulnerable mindset—out of work, at home all the time with nothing to do but scroll online. I wanted to feel like I had more control over the situation than I did.”
From the smaller accounts she followed, Jennifer discovered bigger influencers. She didn’t realize that a vast trail of internet crumbs was leading her straight into the jaws of QAnon, an outlandish far-right conspiracy theory. One that she slid deeper into every day. “I found myself talking more to people online who I didn’t know but who shared these same new beliefs as me,” she says. The validation was intoxicating. Soon she was researching Pizzagate, a bogus QAnon narrative linking Democratic politicians to a child sex ring run out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
When Jennifer started hinting at what she’d discovered on her own account, a childhood friend reached out privately and encouraged her to make sure she was getting her news from legitimate sources. Jennifer brushed her off. “I felt like I had this powerful information,” she says. “Like I was better informed than everyone else. It gives you this feeling of superiority. When people would challenge me, I would just be like, You’re asleep. You’re not woke. You just don’t know.”
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