Tracing the “information terrorists” who fuel conspiracy theories and battles from Gamergate and QAnon to attacks on Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford
The network architecture built in Gamergate helped propel Trump to the presidency and fuel conspiracies like Pizzagate and QAnon. Tweets: @markhertling and @mollymckew Tweets: Mark Hertling / @markhertling : .@MollyMcKew knocks it out of the park once again. What to do with those “fellow citizens” who take advantage of free speech to purposely peddle untruths, propaganda, lying narratives that harm others and undercut our culture and our institutions? http://twitter.com/... Molly McKew / @mollymckew : Foreign powers manipulating Americans using information warfare must pay. But what about domestic forces using the same tactics? My massive piece for @wired on the conspiracy architecture supporting Kavanaugh, & the information terrorists that built it. http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Molly McKew's Wired piece gives the conspiracy machine a genealogy: the harassment network architecture forged during [[a:940909|Gamergate, where trolls masquerading as women of color were later exposed as a dry run for 2016-style misinformation]], did not dissolve after its original target — it became reusable infrastructure. By 2018 it was pointed at Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings, and had already carried Pizzagate and QAnon.
What makes the piece matter is the asymmetry it exposes: platforms invested heavily in foreign information-warfare threats while letting their work on domestic threats like QAnon lag behind, even as feedback loops between Trump and his influencer-and-follower base kept amplifying the same narratives from the top down.
First-order effects
- Targets like Christine Blasey Ford absorb the direct blast: coordinated harassment and conspiracy framing arrive within hours of a named individual entering the news cycle, with no platform mechanism distinguishing them from organic outrage.
- Facebook, Twitter, and Google face immediate pressure to apply the counter-propaganda tools built for ISIS-era foreign threats to domestic networks like QAnon operating inside their own user bases.
Second-order effects
- Enforcement splits along political lines rather than threat lines: when platforms eventually act — banning Trump after January 6 — his allies beat down subsequent efforts to filter election lies, making every moderation decision a contested political act.
- Conspiracy networks adapt by hijacking legitimate movements, as QAnon followers did with #SaveTheChildren and parenting Facebook groups, forcing apolitical communities and nonprofits to police infiltration they never signed up for.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, information operations stop being an episodic foreign-threat problem and become permanent domestic infrastructure: the same playbook migrates from Gamergate to elections to Supreme Court confirmations, and dueling-hashtag events like the Epstein death conspiracies show both parties now fluent in it.
- The structural endpoint is a legitimacy crisis for shared reality itself — platforms become de facto arbiters of political speech, and whoever controls the moderation rules inherits power the original architects never imagined.
The trend: Harassment networks first assembled around Gamergate are hardening into standing domestic information-warfare infrastructure that outlasts any single target and outpaces platform countermeasures.