For two years, Jitarth Jadeja spent most of his time in the darkest corners of the web reading about conspiracy theories. Mr Jadeja, 33, was an avid follower of QAnon — a baseless, far-right theory that started by alleging then-US president Donald Trump was fighting against a secret group of elites who ran a global child sex trafficking ring. For hours each day, Mr Jadeja devoured cryptic predictions shared by an anonymous online poster called Q on the imageboard website 4chan. Mr Jadeja clung to the shadowy figure’s updates until he started noticing that Q was getting things wrong — a lot. In early 2018 for instance, an anonymous poster on 8chan (now known as 8kun) requested Q to ask Mr Trump to say “tip top tippy top” as a shout-out to the QAnon community. Four months after the post, Mr Trump mentioned the phrase in his Easter Egg Roll speech at the White House. The coincidence was almost enough to lay Mr Jadeja’s doubts to rest, but if Q had really told Mr Trump to say the phrase, why did it take him four months to mention it? “I thought, if this can be debunked, then that’s it,” says Mr Jadeja, who lives in Sydney. It only took a quick Google search to find a YouTube video showing clips of Mr Trump saying the phrase on several other occasions. In minutes, Mr Jadeja realised that he had spent two years being led down a rabbit hole of false information. (…) QAnonCasualties – a Reddit community for those impacted by QAnon and former believers — has grown to include 158,000 members since it was created in July 2019. And ReQovery — another Reddit support group geared towards ex-QAnon followers — has attracted almost 9,300 members in less than a year. Like Mr Jadeja, Leila Hay, 19, knew that it was time to break up with Q when she realised none of their predictions had come to pass. “I knew that a lot of the predictions had never come true, but I didn’t realise how many had not come true,” says Ms Hay, who lives in northern England. “I was quite embarrassed.”
via abcnet.au: Believers in QAnon and other conspiracy theories reveal how they climbed out of the rabbit hole