Tom Malinowski: “It is one of the oldest lies in the world. A blood libel. It always goes something like this: that there is a powerful…”

“It is one of the oldest lies in the world. A blood libel. It always goes something like this: that there is a powerful, secret group of people who just happen--many of them--to be Jewish, and they are trying to control the world, and, for good measure, kidnapping our children. This is the central conspiracy theory that QAnon promotes today. And it sounds crazy--so crazy that sometimes we don't take it seriously enough. But throughout history, conspiracy theories, just like this one, have fueled prejudice, terrorism, even genocide. And today, social media is fanning the flames. Their algorithms know everything about us: what we search for online, our biases, and they feed us more and more extreme versions of what they think we want so that we stay glued to our screens and see more ads and buy more stuff. That, above all, is what is causing so many of our fellow Americans to fear and hate one another. And while many extremist groups on the left and the right are recruiting followers online, nothing today matches the scale of QAnon. Nothing comes close. On Facebook alone, QAnon pages and groups have had up to 3 million members there. There have been days this year when the most widely shared social media messages in the country are those promoted by QAnon. The physical threat is also real. The FBI, as we have heard, says that political conspiracy theories like QAnon increasingly motivate domestic extremists to commit violence.…”