How the domestic aesthetics of Instagram repackage QAnon for the masses
When I showed some of these Instagram accounts to Sophie Bishop, a lecturer in digital humanities at King’s College London, she identified in all of them a “very recognizable,” feminine-coded aesthetic. “It’s aspirational, and then it’s also authentic enough to allow for relatability,” she told me. All kinds of influencers strive to make that sort of impression, but it can also help launder disinformation and dangerous ideas: “The original function of influencers was to be more relatable than mainstream media,” Bishop said. “They’re supposed to be presenting something that’s more authentic or more trustworthy or more embedded in reality.”
Instagram is “likely where the next great battle against misinformation will be fought, and yet it has largely escaped scrutiny.” One of the most obvious explanations for that lapse is that Instagram—more than any other major social platform—shows each of its users exactly what they want to see. It’s a habitual, ritualistic space where people (like me) go for examples of how to be happy and well liked; it’s also where we take the chaos of our daily existence and push it into a simple, pleasing form we think other people will appreciate.
An aesthetic that appeals to me personally was being used to mask something that it’s my job to pluck out and pin to the wall: It made me shiver. My years using Instagram as a guide for how to look and how to live have trained me to see cool clothes and well-constructed personal brands as signifiers of something intrinsically good. I’ve curated my feed by hand; the thousands of images I look at each day are ones I have in some way chosen. They’re as much of who I am as any bulleted list of my dreams or desires would be. Why wouldn’t I trust them?
Ablush-colored square filled with the all-caps advice show up every day for something you believe in belongs to one of the least remarkable categories of Instagram content: visually unchallenging, impossible to disagree with, pink. Even if people do not exactly know how to show up every day for something they believe in—particularly during a pandemic—the basic spirit of the message is blandly uplifting for a millisecond during a bleary-eyed morning scroll through the feed: Today, I will, in some way, demonstrate that I believe in something, somehow! Hardly anything about it would dissuade the casual follower from double-tapping her appreciation before moving on.
But this particular image, posted in March by the Utah-based fashion, beauty, and parenting influencer Jalynn Schroeder to more than 50,000 followers, is accompanied by a series of hashtags that includes the initialism WWG1WGA—“Where we go one, we go all”—a motto used by adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. QAnon is flexible and convoluted, but generally posits that President Donald Trump is locked in a battle with the “deep state,” and is attempting to bring down a ring of pedophiles and child traffickers that counts various high-profile politicians and celebrities as co-conspirators. Most famously, it’s the evolution of Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that motivated a man to storm into a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant with an AR-15 in December 2016, bent on exposing a supposed pedophilia ring in its basement, which did not exist.
When Schroeder’s feed nods to Q, it does so subtly, mostly in her stories and captions. On the grid, she posts photos of her manicures, her graphic tees, her favorite gummy vitamins, and the mommy-and-me sundresses she and her young daughter wear. She is also candid about mental health and the effects that giving birth can have on the body; recently, her followers have watched her prepare for and undergo surgery to correct an abdominal separation.
In the course of reporting this story, I contacted a dozen of the women posting about QAnon or related conspiracy theories on their accounts, as well as more than 60 of the women who had commented on their posts in support (with hearts, prayer hands, or emphatic thank-yous), many of whom had followings of their own in the tens of thousands. Very few responded, and most of those who did were hostile, stating that the use of their name or photos in a story was grounds for a lawsuit, or expressing a deep disdain for and distrust of the media—a core tenet of the QAnon belief system, as well as a somewhat common feeling among internet personalities who have successfully created their own large platforms.
Read: Instagram is the internet’s new home for hate
Two others told me that even though they themselves don’t believe in Q, they believe in the right to express oneself online. Ashley Houston, a mom from California who gained most of her 23,000 followers after she started making elegant pastel infographics about child trafficking, has never commented on QAnon or any other conspiracy theories—she prefers primary sources and clear, verifiable facts. Still, she’s friendly with some women who do post about those topics. “It’s okay for their focus to be on what they think is important,” she said. Michelle Merenda, a New Jersey–based parenting and mental-health blogger with 11,000 followers, told me she finds most of her information about child trafficking through hashtags. She listed several mainstream tags, including #saveourchildren, then added, “I do go to #QAnon, also #pedogate, #Pizzagate. And I know a lot of those things are conspiracy theories, but … there’s a lot of [questions posted there] that I would consider something that I would ask, and would kind of want to look into.”
Though Facebook, which owns Instagram, removed some QAnon-related content in May, conspiracism is still flourishing on the platform, largely untouched—especially in private QAnon groups, whose total membership is reportedly in the millions—despite more substantial recent actions from other social-media giants such as Twitter and TikTok. (Reddit is further ahead than all of them, having implemented a blanket ban against QAnon nearly two years ago.)
When I showed some of these Instagram accounts to Sophie Bishop, a lecturer in digital humanities at King’s College London, she identified in all of them a “very recognizable,” feminine-coded aesthetic. “It’s aspirational, and then it’s also authentic enough to allow for relatability,” she told me. All kinds of influencers strive to make that sort of impression, but it can also help launder disinformation and dangerous ideas: “The original function of influencers was to be more relatable than mainstream media,” Bishop said. “They’re supposed to be presenting something that’s more authentic or more trustworthy or more embedded in reality.”
Read: The coronavirus conspiracy boom
Time spent there is reciprocal, a never-ending exchange of sweet words and the heart icons that are the only possible way to instantly respond to a piece of content on the platform. Instagram is women’s work, as it demands skills they’ve historically been compelled to excel at: presenting as lovely, presenting as desirable, presenting as good, safe, nonthreatening. All of which, of course, are valuable appearances for a dangerous conspiracy theory to have. Ironically, following many of the QAnon hobbyists will lead to a suggestion from Instagram that you follow Chrissy Teigen, one of QAnon’s designated villains, who also happens to have created a brand based on a desirable domestic life. The platform itself is operating on its interpretation of beautiful surfaces, and far less so on what the people producing them are saying.
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