Misinformation or activism?: analyzing networked moral panic through an exploration of #SaveTheChildren

ABSTRACT

Central to the growth and visibility of conspiracy theory QAnon is the #SaveTheChildren movement – a digital social movement aimed to bring awareness to and end child trafficking. This paper analyzes the #SaveTheChildren movement on image-sharing platform Instagram, where the hashtag (and related others) had to be shielded by the platform because of its association with QAnon. A thematic analysis of #SaveTheChildren posts examines the motivations, tactics, and desired outcomes of the movement. Emergent themes highlight the pervasive spread of misinformation regarding human trafficking and the ideological, political, and social motivations of posters. Drawing on shared reality theory and social identity theory, we argue that the movement represents a ‘networked moral panic’ and explore the structural limitations of digital social movements in an era of information disorder.

KEYWORDS:

• Misinformation
• QAnon
• moral panic
• activism
• social movements
• collective identity

Acknowledgement

This work was made possible thanks to support from the Center for an Informed Public at UW, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Microsoft’s “Defending Democracy” program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data was collected as part of a broader research project into the relationship between #SaveTheChildren supporters and news media. Accordingly, data was collected by querying CrowdTangle for Facebook posts related to the four hashtags AND ‘news, mainstream, media, MSM, OR reported’ to capture posts that referred to the issue of trafficking and some reference to its media (social or traditional) coverage.

2 For the sake of anonymity, we refer to the users not by their actual handles but by a ranking code e.g., ‘User 1’ is the Instagram account with the largest number of posts in our dataset.

3 Unavailable posts were kept in the dataset as CrowdTangle kept their associated text content (i.e., the caption and hashtags) in addition to engagement data.

4 The published tax records of OUR Rescue highlight a substantial increase in donations for the organizations in 2020 (see https://ourrescue.org/financials) – increasing their total assets from $30 million in 2019 to over $68 million by the end of 2020. Based on the number of times we observed users claiming they donated to OUR Rescue and calling for others to do the same, it seems apparent that the organization profited immensely from those involved in the Save the Children movement.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel E. Moran

Dr. Rachel E. Moran is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. Moran received her doctoral degree in 2020 from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the role of trust in digital information environments and is particularly concerned with how trust is implicated in the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

Stephen Prochaska

Stephen Prochaska is a PhD student at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington’s Information School. His research examines how technical systems and rhetorical strategies facilitate participatory disinformation and how participatory processes combine with disinformation to mobilize audiences based on false in misleading information