QAnon

That a government insider with Q-level clearance was posting coded intelligence to imageboards, revealing that a cabal of political and celebrity figures ran a global child trafficking network, and that a coordinated operation was about to arrest them en masse in an event called 'the Storm'.

The first post appeared on 4chan on 28 October 2017 predicting Hillary Clinton's imminent arrest and passport revocation. The format — cryptic questions, capitalised fragments, dates — invited readers to interpret rather than verify, which made falsification socially costly and participation addictive. It inherited Pizzagate's cast and structure directly. The posting account moved from 4chan to 8chan to 8kun, all sites administered by Jim Watkins; forensic linguistic analyses commissioned separately by the New York Times and by Swiss firm OrphAnalytics both identified Watkins and his son Ron as likely authors of the later posts.

Adherents have been charged with murder, kidnapping, an armed standoff at the Hoover Dam, and the murder of a Gambino crime family boss. QAnon iconography was widespread at the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, and multiple people charged in connection with it cited the beliefs. The 'Save the Children' hashtag campaign flooded genuine anti-trafficking organisations with false tips, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported that the volume degraded its ability to work real cases. Families have documented the loss of relatives to the movement in the way previously reserved for high-control groups.