What Will Meta Do About Trump’s QAnon Extremism?

The New York Times reports:

In September, former President Donald J. Trump went on Truth Social, his social network, and shared an image of himself wearing a lapel pin in the form of the letter Q, along with a phrase closely associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement: “The storm is coming.”

In doing so, Mr. Trump ensured that the message — first posted by a QAnon-aligned account — would be hugely amplified, visible to his more than four million followers. He was also delivering what amounted to an unmistakable endorsement of the movement, which falsely and violently claims that leading Democrats are baby-eating devil worshipers.

Two years after he was banished from most mainstream social media sites for his role in inciting the Capitol riot, his online presence has grown only more extreme — even if it is far less visible to most Americans, who never use the relatively obscure platforms where he has been posting at a sometimes astonishing clip.

Read the full article. The piece goes on to ponder Meta’s response when Trump brings his increasingly violent extremism to Facebook and Instagram.

Donald Trump is now free to post again on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But there is no sign that he curtailed the behavior that got him exiled in the first place, and his online presence, though less visible, has grown only more extreme. https://t.co/CSOUB165ix

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 28, 2023

Trump’s Evolution in Social-Media Exile: More QAnon, More Extremes

(And yet, @Meta reinstates his accounts, after Twitter did the same 🤔) https://t.co/vgeLkf30Gu pic.twitter.com/v8XvVTF7E3

— Fabio Chiusi (@fabiochiusi) January 28, 2023