QAnon and the Rebirth of the Satanic Panic in the Digital Age

Abstract

The dramatic rise of the novel conspiracy theory known as QAnon had many observers wondering how a belief system so divorced from reality could gain traction in the modern networked era. This paper seeks to answer that question by comparing the QAnon movement with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Like QAnon, the Satanic Panic rallied its believers around baseless claims of cultic child abuse and murder. This paper argues that the recurrence of such a belief system is the byproduct of a profound shift in how citizens consume information, comparing the deregulation of television in the 1980s to the adoption of social media as a legitimate news source in the present day. In both cases, the entrance of novel forms of media, which lacked sufficient regulatory standards, allowed ideologically and monetarily motivated individuals to enter the public sphere and peddle dangerously false information, eventually fomenting widespread moral panic. Hopefully, by looking towards the past for answers, this paper can help us understand why such panics occur and how the same media systems that helped to generate these panics can also stop them.