Some years on from the height of QAnon's popularity, a former believer has opened up about following the conspiracy theory.
QAnon is believed to have first started in 2017 after an anonymous poster, who hailed themselves as 'Q', alleged that they had a level of US security approval known as 'Q clearance'.
Using the message board 4chan, the person started sharing 'Q drops' with far-right propaganda and dozens of conspiracy theories, one being that the US government, media and financial worlds are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
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Over the years, QAnon theories have spread like wildfire across the internet - something which former QAnon believer Katrina Vaillancourt partly blames for the group ending up having a 'mental and emotional grip' on her.
It was in 2020 Katrina fell down what she calls the 'rabbit hole' that is QAnon - a time when there was a lot of uncertainty in the US.
The pandemic was ravaging parts of the globe, large populations were on lockdown, new mRNA vaccines were the proposed solution, and Donald Trump was coming to the end of his presidential term having taken over what was once a Democratic country.
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Katrina had long been a follower of Bernie Sanders and said she was 'terrified' of Trump, but all this changed overnight for her.
She explained to UNILAD: "Bernie Sanders, in May of 2020, endorsed Joe Biden. And for me, that was heartbreaking. It was not okay.
"We were also two months into the pandemic, and I did not trust what I was seeing in our news in regards to the origins of the virus and the plan for resolving the crisis that we were in."
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Going on to say that she had 'lost all faith' in the political party that she had followed for many years, Katrina also started to grow suspicious about the pandemic and how it was handled after watching Plandemic - a trilogy of conspiracy theory films.
But it was a 10-part docuseries called Fall of The Cabal, which she'd been urged to watch by a friend, that sealed the deal for her.
The series looks at a host of conspiracy theories that link with some of QAnon's core beliefs, as well as white hats (somewhat ethical security hackers) and their connection to Trump.
Katrina explained that QAnoners believe that Trump could 'pull off this plan to defeat the evil forces in our world and bring about the world we want to see'.
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It's also believed by some that Q is John F. Kennedy Jr, who died in a plane crash in 1999.
After watching Fall of The Cabal, Katrina was intrigued by QAnon. While some of the topics covered in the docuseries were 'so far out' Katrina didn't believe them, there were also points she found 'hard to dismiss' and therefore starting investigating them online.
But by doing this, Katrina found herself trapped in a filter bubble (an algorithmic bias that skews or limits the information an individual user sees on the internet by using algorithms) of QAnon-favoring content and saw herself being overloaded with information on the matter.
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"Immediately, everything that was designed for my particular online usage filled with QAnon content," Katrina said. "I felt like I'd gone through the veil to see what was actually happening.
"It put me in these echo chambers of cognitive bias," she added.
Eventually Katrina went on to become a 'die-hard believer' of QAnon. However, this went on to all change after a few months for a few different reasons.
The first thing that Katrina says helped get the ball rolling in shifting her mindset was her husband Stephen asking her if she'd be willing to be wrong about what she thought - the same way he was.
Katrina said yes; but at this point she was still pretty adamant that what she believed in regards to QAnon was right. With this in mind, her husband suggested she started showing him evidence to back her beliefs.
"Stephen expressed a willingness to check out my research - 'research' - with me for only two hours a week," Katrina told UNILAD.
"I was inundating him with all of the new things I was learning, and he couldn't take it. It was creating a lot of stress and angst, and that's not how he wanted to spend his time."
Admitting that she had a 'serious online addiction' to all the QAnon content she was reading, Stephen's willingness to look over what Katrina was showing him - knowing that he'd be fact checking it - urged Katrina to check the sources more thoroughly herself.
"When I saw something, I would immediately do fact checks on it," she said. "And that started to diversify the information I was seeing again."
Then there was the idea of Q being JFK Jr and him making a reappearance to endorse Trump, which was one of QAnon's core beliefs at the time.
Katrina recalled: "I had put confidence into Q being JFK Jr and I thought, with so much at stake, he would have to reappear and endorse Trump. Of course he never did, but I was banking on his reappearance and so that, for me, was a big disillusionment."
There was also something known as 'The Storm' that QAnoners believed in: the idea that those in the so-called cabal (such as politicians, Hollywood stars, high-ranking government officials and other people of influence) would be brought down by the Trump administration and arrested, or possibly even executed.
Like JFK Jr's reemergence, this never happened.
"There were several reports that The Storm, the unsealing, the indictments, the the mass arrests were going to happen, and they were all false reports," Katrina shared.
"This happened three times. It's very common in QAnon for them to say 'The Storm is happening!' and it's not. That really shattered my trust in a number of QAnon influencer channels."
Another factor that weighed into Katrina's decision to step away from QAnon was the affect it was having on her personal relationships.
She said: "I had family members who were afraid to talk to me and distance things in themselves for me. So I went from like, literally, [a] community of hundreds of people where I felt a lot of love and acceptance and joie de vivre, to less than 10 who I felt like I could talk to."
Eventually Katrina came to realize that losing these relationships 'was not a price worth paying' for being a QAnon member.
Katrina delves deeper into her experience of QAnon and how she got out in her book, ReQovery: How I Tumbled Down the QAnon Rabbit Hole and Climbed Out - which is available to purchase on Amazon.
UNILAD's new Stripped Back series is released from September 23 and focuses on conspiracy theories through interviews with believers, experts and others impacted by the claims.
Topics: Community, Conspiracy Theories, Life, Politics, QAnon, Social Media
Niamh Shackleton