Chapter 6: Platformed Conspiracy: Social Media and the Digital Public Sphere

When SNCs describe how QAnon entered their lives, they return again and again to the same culprit: social media. Such platforms were described not simply as where conspiracy spread, but how it spread as the medium and the message intertwined. Facebook threads, YouTube feeds, and chat forums turned ordinary acts of connection into the channels through which belief travelled. What once linked families and friends became the very networks that divided them. This chapter examines social media as a contributing catalyst that made QAnon possible, not through technology alone, but through feeling and the architectures of care, validation, and repetition that ultimately made conviction feel relationally true. The chapter unfolds in three parts. First, we explore how social media reconfigured emotional life, setting the stage for new forms of moral community. Second, we trace who fell into those networks and why, revealing generational differences in how people learned to trust online. Third, we return to immersion, showing how belonging and routine hardened into loyalty. Together, these stories reveal how the infrastructures built to connect people were described by SNCs as also creating the relational conditions in which QAnon could thrive.