What will payments over the internet look like in 2030?

A revolution in finance and payments. Thats what crypto-based platforms like Bitcoin, decentralized finance and stablecoins are attempting to do. But just because traditional money is centralized around monolithic central banks doesnt mean that it cant have a revolution of its own.

Over the next ten years, a big bang will be unfolding in central bank land. ISO 20022, a new standard for communicating electronic payments instructions between financial institutions, will be taking over. This, combined with the emergence of real-time central bank retail payment systems, means that payments in 2030 are going to be much better than in 2020.

J.P. Koning, a CoinDesk columnist, worked as an equity researcher at a Canadian brokerage firm and was a financial writer at a large Canadian bank. He runs the popularMoneynessblog. This post is part of CoinDesk's "Internet 2030" series about the future of the crypto economy.

Anyone involved in anarchic finance may want to keep one eye on what the suits have planned for the next decade. Not everyone will be included in this centralized revolution. Decentralized options will be the go-to back-up for many people.

We rarely notice standards, but they affect all parts of our daily life. Standards govern everything from screw thread spacing (ISO 68-1) to country codes (ISO 3166) to child seats (ISO 13216) to quality management (ISO 9000).

Settling on a uniform way of doing things makes life easier. Prior to the 1950s, for instance, international cargo shipping handling required a Tetris-like approach to dealing with diverse package sizes. It was expensive, dangerous and labor-intensive. Putting everything in a universal metal container made the cargo handling process go much more smoothly. The International Standards Organization, an international non-governmental technical body founded after WWII, helped the industry settle on a standard definition for shipping containers by creating ISO 338, ISO 790 and ISO 1897.

The principles that apply to shipping are equally applicable to payments and commerce. To avoid a cacophony of different payment requests and orders, it helps if everyone uses a common grammar. The payments community builds this grammar by agreeing ahead of time on a fixed way of formatting messages. Standard headers. Footers. Payee account number fields. Character limits.

Take the U.S. People usually pay their utility bills by making an automated clearinghouse (or ACH) payment. All parties to an ACH payment must agree to use the common grammar set out by the National Automated Clearing House Association, or NACHA, the not-for-profit organization that governs U.S. ACH systems. A typical NACHA message looks like this:

NACHA message example

To the human eye, a NACHA-formatted message looks like gibberish. But there are many advantages to a standardized message format like this, including that it is readable by machines. And so all ACH payments can be automated from one end to the other. This reduces costs, processing times and errors. Without NACHAs standards, monetary chaos would result.

There are a number of local message standards in the U.S. The Federal Reserve, for instance, requires participants to use its own proprietary messaging format if they wish to make wire transfers via the Fedwire Funds Service. And so a U.S. bank, municipality, or corporation must be fluent in the financial grammars of both NACHA and the Fed.

This proliferation of messaging standards is a global phenomenon. The U.K.s multiple payments systems each use a different one. The Faster Payments Service uses a modified version of ISO 8583, BACS (the UKs ACH system) uses Standard-18, and CHAPS (its large value payment system) uses the SWIFT MT messaging format.

It is into this babel of standards that ISO 20022 is being ushered. The idea is to convert all existing payments systems from their own proprietary messaging standards over to ISO 20022. And so ISO 20022 will become the English of payments, a global lingua franca for transferring value electronically.

ISO 20022 isnt new. The ISO began to devise the standard in the early 2000s. In the 2010s, a few trailblazing nations shifted over to it from their domestic standards. The Chinese are the leaders, having converted their main payment systems to ISO 20022 in 2013.

But most countries have yet to make the shift. The U.S.s main large value payment system, Fedwire, was originally slated to start transitioning to ISO 20022 over a three-year period beginning in late 2020. But thanks in part to COVID-19, the start date has been pushed to at least 2022, which means that the final changeover wont be complete till 2025 or so. The European Central Banks large value system, Target2, will start its transition in November 2022. The UK will switch in April 2022 in conjunction with a new real-time gross settlement system.

Probably the most important piece of financial infrastructure to make the shift will be the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT. SWIFT operates the global messaging network that banks rely on for making international payments. It intends to begin the switch to ISO 20022 near the end of 2022. There will be a three year coexistence period in which ISO 20022 and SWIFTs legacy MT messaging format can both be used. Only in November 2025 the legacy format will be turned off.

One of the big advantages of a universal payments language is that banks, businesses, governments, and other actors can stop supporting multiple formats. Whether a payment is made in dollars over Fedwire, in renminbi via the Peoples Bank of China, or from euros to rand along SWIFT, a single unique payment standard will prevail. Thats pretty neat.

When a payment gets passed on from one system to another, it has to get re-translated into that systems language. This means data loss. But with one universal standard, no data gets lost in translation.

ISO 20022 has some nice features of its own that other standards lack. To begin with, it can carry more data than other messaging standards. No more cramming information into the wrong fields and truncation of names and addresses. This means that fewer messages will be tagged by machines as requiring human intervention. With fewer repairs needed, the overall payment process will go faster, require less labour, and reduce costs.

ISO 20022 also allows for more precision. SWIFT asks us to imagine a payment sent to CUBA SPORTS BAR GRILLE in Louisiana. In the pre-ISO 20022 format, Cuba might mistakenly trip a sanctions filter. But with ISO 20022 the data is carefully structured such that the word CUBA is designated in the name field, and so wont get held up.

It will be tomorrow's unbanked who will be the natural customers of non-gated decentralized systems.

This standardization of global payments grammar is arriving at the same time that 24/7 instant retail payment systems are being introduced by central banks all over the world. Until recently, small payments to and from bank accounts were typically processed by central banks over a 2-3 day settlement window. That central banks typically close at nights and on weekends only added to waiting time. Delays like this were fine in the 1950s, but modern consumers raised on a diet of instantaneous email and on-demand video expect much more from their bank accounts.

The U.K.s Faster Payments scheme, introduced in 2007, was one of the first real-time retail payment systems. More upgrades came in the 2010s including Swedens BiR, Singapores FAST, and Indias IMPS. Canadas Real Time Rail will be in place in 2022 while the U.S.s FedNow real-time system is slated to arrive in 2024.

By 2030, 24/7 real-time retail payments will be de rigueur not only in developed nations but also in developing nations in Africa, the Middle East, and South America. And all of these blazing fast systems will have settled on one unified language, ISO 20022, which means lower costs, fewer errors, and more automation. In short, centralized payments are going to get very, very good over the next few years.

Where do blockchains fit in all of this? In times past, blockchain advocates have pigeonholed centralized payments systems as archaic and clumsy. But tomorrows payments are unlikely to conform to these stereotypes.

Given this firming up of the center, blockchain-based platforms will have to find ways to innovate around the edges. In 2030, there will still be people who are excluded from the ISO 20022 real-time payments nirvana Ive just described. There will be some who are frozen out because they are protesting their governments. This is happening in Belorussia today. Or those selling legal, albeit controversial, products, say like sex workers who often face deplatforming.It will be tomorrows unbanked who will be the natural customers of non-gated decentralized systems.

View post:

J.P. Koning: The Standard About to Revolutionize Payments - CoinDesk - CoinDesk

Nozomi Hayase, PhD, is a US-based liberation psychologist and widely published journalist. She has authored the book Wikileaks, the Global Fourth Estate: History Is Happening. In an exclusive (electronic) interview with John Kendall Hawkins, Hayase talks about the significance of WikiLeaks and why its editor-in-chief and publisher needs public support, as the US extradition hearing of Julian Assange unfolds in the UK.

How are the extradition proceedings going?

First of all, Julian Assange's US extradition case is a direct attack on the First Amendment by the US government. This is the first time the (US) Espionage Act is being used to prosecute a publisher. If it's successful, it would threaten media freedom everywhere. What has been unfolding this month at the London court is a Kafkaesque show-trial.

There have been problems with the abuse of process. Julian has not been allowed to sit with his lawyers and has been placed behind a glass cage, as was the case during the hearing in February. NGOs and international political observers were denied remote access to the court on the first day of the hearing. This includes Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.

With that said, I think Julian's defence team has been doing extremely well. From an offer of a pardon for Assange by the US President Donald Trump to his administration's high-level plan to revoke Assange's political asylum granted by Ecuador, the defence team's witness testimonies have revealed the highly political nature of this case.

In your preface to WikiLeaks, the Global Fourth Estate, you reference "illegitimate governance," by which you seem to mean any "democracy" that hides from the people what they need to know in order to pressure their representatives in Congress (or Parliament) to make corrective changes. Can you say more about such "illegitimate governance" and how it relates to Assange's work?

Governments in modern democratic states theoretically require the consent of the governed. For people to give their consent to those who govern, they need to be informed about what their governments are doing. Illegitimate forms of governance are ones that violate this principle. We can see it in oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, where the governments can act dictatorially with draconian top down laws, coercing people's will.

In western societies, where there is a notion of free press, governments don't engage in outright violence. Instead, they engage in secrecy and manipulation of public perception, as Noam Chomsky documents in his seminal book The Engineering of Consent, which fits into this category. Assange, through his work with WikiLeaks, defended the public's right to know. By publishing material that is verified to be authentic and is of public interest, WikiLeaks helped to keep the government honest.

How does what you call "revolutionary journalism" compare to good old adversarial journalism?

The role of journalism from the very beginning was to perform vital checks and balances of government power. The founding fathers of the US had an inherent distrust of government. Thomas Jefferson once noted that if he had to choose between the government and the newspaper, he would choose the latter. So the press was meant to be a watchdog. Sadly, the media has now been infiltrated with commercial interests, and is failing to fulfil its role. Corporate media has become a stenographer of power. Instead of seeking the truth and challenging power, they lie and deceive the public.

When I say WikiLeaks is revolutionary, I am echoing the sentiment described by Orwell's phrase: "in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act". When western governments criticise WikiLeaks and create controversy, it is actually deflecting people from recognising the failure of the established media and their lack of commitment to the duty of a free press. What WikiLeaks does is not radical. It is in line with the tradition of a free press.

In the 60s, we had alternative media streamsthe birth of FM radio, which activists listened to, as well as magazines like Ramparts, which gave long-read exposes of what "The Man" was up to. Can you compare Ramparts to WikiLeaks?

I don't compare WikiLeaks to Ramparts. WikiLeaks invented scientific journalism, which was unprecedented. Just like scientists writing scientific papers are required to provide all the data that they used to form their conclusions, WikiLeaks publishes full archives (after going through rigorous harm minimisation process, to redact information that brings imminent harm). They provide a means for ordinary people to independently check the claims of journalists and this enables a mechanism of accountability for journalists. So, with WikiLeaks, the source of legitimacy that used to be placed in the "objectivity" of journalists (that determine their editorial decisions) is now placed in the actual source documents. People don't have to believe journalists, they can independently check the validity of the reporting on their own.

WikiLeaks provided a means for common people to claim their own history. By opening their archives, WikiLeaks freed people from a stolen history that repeats the abuses of the past. Leaked documents allow us to look at past events anew and restore perspectives that were oppressed and pushed to the margins.

Different cultures have different ideas of what freedom of expression should look likeChina, India, Japan, the US, Francebut for Americans, their right to free expression came out of a revolutionary rejection of Britain. Their initial expression to the British was their freedom.

I think the US First Amendment was truly a major milestone in securing individual liberty, but it has shown to be not sufficiently fascist-proof. It has been compromised through economic censorship, now increasingly carried on by giant tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, censoring and de-platforming anyone who challenges the status quo.

American people believe that they live in a democracy and a free society. In fact, they often compare their right to free speech with oppressive regimes like in China and Russia that don't have that protection. But what we have here in the US is a facade of a democracy and the illusion of freedom. While Americans live under this illusion, people in China know that their government engages in propaganda, and they are not getting accurate information. So at the end of the day, what we have is the same. None of us have the right to free speech and we are all controlled. The difference is just whether it is done overtly or done subversively. It is a choice between Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

How would you describe the benefit of what Assange has done for people around the world?

Even though WikiLeaks is a transnational journalistic organisation, I see their work as being very much tied to the impulse that came through the US during its Revolutionary War against Great Britain. This impulse was people's aspiration toward individual liberty. I think what happened at the time in the US was historically significant and its impact is not only important for the US but also for the entire world. US independence from King George III set a new trajectory in history. It opened up the possibility to move away from monarchy and into creating a society based on the rule of law.

Thomas Jefferson, as a principal author of the Declaration of Independence said, "All men are created equal" and are endowed with certain unalienable rights, such as "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". Those words inspired people around the worldeven to this day.

Of course, as history has shown, our founding fathers were not perfect. They had their own hypocrisy and contradictions manifested in the genocide of natives, enslavement of blacks and suppression of women. But I would like to think that the signers of this document, 56 people who put their lives and livelihood on the line to achieve America's independence, believed in the ideals spelled out in the document. I would like to think those words were not lies. I see them as promises and believe that Jefferson had aspired to create a society that lives up to those words.

WikiLeaks released documents that helped us see the unaccounted power inside the US and its history. The publication of the collateral murder video, the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the illegal torture at Guantanamo Bay showed us how America had become a global empire, repeating its dark past of killing natives and destroying their culture, now under the name of fighting terrorism abroad in the oil-rich Middle East. We were able to see America's betrayal of its own ideals.

So what WikiLeaks did was help ordinary people around the world to engage in history, and make society more democratic and free. When we truly recognise the significance of WikiLeaks, we can see why Julian has been put in prison, tortured and politically persecuted. We can understand why the former CIA director and Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service" and declared war against the whistleblowing site. We can understand why the CIA, via a Spanish security firm, spied on Julian and his privileged communication with his lawyers while he was inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and as Julian's defence revealed, why the CIA plotted to poison him. I hope people then realise what is truly at stake with Julian's extradition case and how we need to do whatever it takes to stop it.

Link:

The importance of WikiLeaks worldwide - The Daily Star

RELATED: 'Supercharged conspiracy theory QAnon takes root in Georgia'

Steve Fennessy: This is Georgia Today, a production of Georgia Public Broadcasting. I'm Steve Fennessy. It's Friday, September 25, 2020.

Stephanie Grohe: I made very clear directives in the group. I kicked somebody out of the group this morning because they were determined to bring their Q posters. And I told them, this is not about Q.

Chris Joyner: Right.

Steve Fennessy: Today, Chris Joyner, an investigative reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, takes us down the rabbit hole of QAnon, a vast and preposterous conspiracy theory and, now, rapidly growing political movement that's found fertile ground in Atlanta's far northern suburbs. But its beginnings go back at least four years ago to a pizza shop in Washington, D.C.. So, Chris, we're here today to talk about QAnon, but actually the story of QAnon begins before we even heard what QAnon is. I'm thinking of 2016 about something called Pizzagate or what became known as Pizzagate. What was that?

Chris Joyner: So Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that involved a pizza restaurant in the metro D.C. area called Comet Ping Pong. And it developed, as many of these things do, online. And there was a belief that there was a hidden part of that pizza parlor where Democratic elites were using it to kidnap and torture children, sexually tortured them. And its a far obviously, it's a far-fetched-sounding idea. But it gained a lot of traction, so much so that a man drove from North Carolina armed with an assault rifle and a pistol and broke in, in an attempt to liberate the children he believed were being held there.

Newscast: A North Carolina man was arrested Sunday in Washington, D.C., after a shooting that he says was motivated by an Internet conspiracy theory.

Newscast: An adult male, approximately in his late 20s, entered the Comet Pizza with an assault rifle.

Chris Joyner: A lot of this developed from the leaked emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, and they were dissected and misinterpreted online in various ways that sort of allowed the creation of this conspiracy theory.

Steve Fennessy: Comet Ping Pong was was, as you said, a popular pizza joint

Chris Joyner: Oh and a family place, too!

Steve Fennessy: And a family place where there were Democratic fundraisers. And so it was referenced often in the leaked emails.

Chris Joyner: Exactly.

Steve Fennessy:And at some point those things became twisted into something incomprehensible.

Chris Joyner: Yeah, it was a real case of people taking two and two and getting, you know, cheese pizza out of it. It was they got a very strange result by putting all these these elements together. And it became a big story and it was somewhat laughed off, even though it was dangerous. But in some ways, that's where people date the genesis of the QAnon conspiracy web. It actually predates the person or people that are known as Q this anonymous online person who drops cryptic clues on various deep web message boards that are supposed to suggest to people that there is a deep state conspiracy of Hollywood and Washington elites who are engaged in trafficking children for sex purposes. And there's a part of the conspiracy that believes that they're harvesting a chemical from their blood to keep them young and that Donald Trump is attempting to reveal this elite cabal, is battling it and they're battling him. Because the belief here is that Q is a government insider who's working with Donald Trump or on behalf of Donald Trump.

Steve Fennessy: It sounds like you're you're almost speaking in religious terms. It sounds almost like there are almost Biblical references being made.

Chris Joyner: Well, yeah. I mean, because it is it's apocalyptic in its sort of tone that, you know, the forces of good are engaged in a battle against evil that in the end will result in a sort of new society, a sort of Second Coming sort of a language for people who are familiar with evangelical Christianity. So, yeah, I mean, in some ways it does take on a very religious tone; its also a very populist tone. The idea that there is an elite group that conspires against the rest of us.

Steve Fennessy: Right.

Chris Joyner: And that we're in a constant struggle to reveal a secret society, whether it's the Illuminati or the Freemasons or this elite cabal of, you know, cannibalistic pedophiles that are supposed to be out there. There's nothing new about conspiracy theories. What is kind of unique about QAnon is how all-encompassing and limber it is as conspiracy theory. It is. I I've talked about it as the conspiracy theory that eats all the other conspiracy theories. A lot of what attracts people to QAnon are things that attract people to other sort of subterranean cultures, right? Its this idea that they know something that other people don't know? You know, those folks who are, you know, kids of the '90s, remember how how popular TheX-Fileswere for the same reason. It touches all those buttons that you just love; that there's this secret world and only you're privy to it.

Steve Fennessy: Right.

Chris Joyner: And, you know, this sort of like peeling of the onion to get to the truth. In the QAnon culture, it's Do your own research. That's what they encourage you to do. And they will say specifically, Do your own research, but don't trust the mainstream media. So that cuts off an entire avenue. And the same thing happens in white supremacist culture and a lot of other extremist groups.

Steve Fennessy: So the dogma that they embrace is becomes irrefutable, almost by definition that there is nothing you can say

Chris Joyner: Yeah, and QAnon especially so. You know, people walk away from white supremacy all the time. QAnon is so impervious to other bits of information that would, you know, clue a person in to say, "Hey, maybe this is a bunch of malarkey."

Steve Fennessy: So, Chris, I understand there are now almost 5,000 messages from Q. How frequently are his followers hearing from him or her or them?

Chris Joyner: There will be times where there are multiple in a day and then there will be times when there is sort of a drier period. There are a lot of them and you can pore over them like Nostradamus. You know, and a lot of them make less sense than Nostradamus.

Steve Fennessy: Yeah.

Chris Joyner: They're they're so heavily coded and the language is weird. Some of it tries to take on a sort of military affect which goes towards, you know, the authenticity of Q in that community.

Steve Fennessy: At what point did QAnon get on your radar in a way that made you say to yourself: This is something we need to be writing about?

Chris Joyner: It got on my radar a little more than a year ago, maybe a year-and-a-half ago. As I noticed, it had picked up steam and it was really sort of flourishing. But as a local issue, it really wasn't until the pandemic that it started catching my eye a little more. It just began growing very rapidly, particularly on Facebook, particularly after the March shutdown.

Steve Fennessy: At the AJC, Chris Joyner covers fringe political movements, which often bring out just a handful of demonstrators. But at a march in August that attracted QAnon followers, he was in for a surprise. That's ahead. This is Georgia Today.

[BREAK]

Steve Fennessy: This is Georgia Today. We're talking with Chris Joyner, an investigative reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about the appeal and growth of QAnon in Georgia. In August, you attended a Save the Children march up in Woodstock. What was that all about?

Chris Joyner: Well, it was it was interesting. I'd been in this Facebook group just sort of monitoring and trying to get a sense of the flavor of that group. And they began fairly quickly organizing towards a date in early August.

Steve Fennessy: So do these start these groups as honest, sort of saving the children groups or were they infiltrated and co-opted by QAnon? What what came first?

Chris Joyner: From what I can tell from my reporting, these were created specifically as QAnon groups.

Steve Fennessy: Okay.

Chris Joyner: But with non-QAnon language. These were branded specifically, as you know, "You're concerned about sex trafficking in your state." They were moving towards a date where they would be a coordinated series of marches and there was one here in Woodstock in early August. I cover lots of, you know, fringe elements, and it is very rare to see a virtual community turn out in real life in those kind of numbers. In this case, when I got there and I saw, there were like three or four or five hundred people running out of cars.

Steve Fennessy: Were you surprised?

Chris Joyner: I was very surprised. And I think that is that says something about their recruiting tactics, the issue they chose, and where they chose to do it.

Steve Fennessy: Right.

Chris Joyner: You know, many of them had not been involved with this group for terribly long.

Steve Fennessy: Yeah.

Chris Joyner: They they saw what they saw was it was concerned about sex trafficking. They were politically aligned being, you know, conservative and suburban and largely pro-Trump. Pretty explicitly pro-Trump, actually. And so, I mean, it was, you know, come out into your community and march against sex trafficking is a pretty easy get for a lot of these people. But when I joined and walking along with the march I began to pick out on their signs hashtags that are specific to the Q community, you know, code words like Frazzledrip and Adrenochrome, thats vocabulary specifically from QAnon. And then as they were marching, the back half of this large group was chanting, We Go One, We Go All, which is a popular slogan insideQAnon in fact, it's probably the you you would describe it as probably the QAnon motto.

Steve Fennessy: What were the marchers reaction to you as a representative of the mainstream media, which, according to their beliefs, is actively involved in suppressing knowledge of this vast conspiracy?

Chris Joyner: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the short answer is they were deeply, deeply suspicious. And in some cases, hostile to my being there.

Steve Fennessy: But how so? And what kind of reactions did you get?

Chris Joyner: Well, because a lot of the QAnon culture believes that members of the mainstream media are either incompetently failing to report on the cabal or are in league with the cabal and covering it up, I you know I'm seen as really there, you know, on the evil side of the Good versus Evil battle. OK. So I was a little, you know, prepared for that.

Chris Joyner: Could you tell me about your signs? Tell me about what is Frazzledrip?

Chris Joyner: So when I was at the rally in Woodstock last month, I was interviewing a man who had brought a sign that read Frazzledrip, which is a code word for a QAnon conspiracy theory involving an alleged video on former Congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop that is supposed to be of Hillary Clinton and her aide, Huma Abedin, sacrificing a child and drinking its blood. But while I was talking to him about his sign, I was interrupted by another person in the march who wanted to interrogate me as to why I was talking to him.

Woman: I heard youre with the AJC.

Chris Joyner: I am.

Woman: Have you spoken with the leader of the group or the organizer

Chris Joyner: Stephanie?

Woman: Yeah.

Chris Joyner: Yes, I spoke to her on the phone earlier.

Woman: Okay. I was just curious how many more people of the group that youve interviewed.

Chris Joyner: Well I interviewed them

Chris Joyner: So I asked her what to make of the crowd, at the end of the protests, it was chanting: We Go One We Go All. And she essentially denied it.

Chris Joyner: The back half of this group. I think probably a couple hundred, were chanting We Go One We Go All.

Woman: I understand that. But that was one small section. If you look, if you were to really look at the signs, at what the people are wearing on their shirts, what they were chanting

Chris Joyner: No, I totally get your point.

Woman: Right. And so I know when I go and read the newspaper tomorrow and I see what maybe little bit news coverage we get on TV, it's going to be to try to totally discredit and tie this to things that are wackadoo, that

Chris Joyner: They really wanted to portray this march as a, you know, solely sex trafficking, apolitical awareness event and fundraiser, even. And I brought up the We Go One We Go All chants to one of the organizers of the protests, Stephanie Grohe, and she told me that they had been forbidden from saying that.

Stephanie Grohe: So I made very clear directives in the group. I kicked somebody out of the group this morning because they were determined to bring their Q posters. And I told them thatthis is not about Q.

Chris Joyner: Right.

Stephanie Grohe: This is about these these fundraisers. It's about the children. It's about trafficking.

Chris Joyner: But having been a part of that community on that Facebook group for a number of weeks, I knew that there was this large element of QAnon culture inside this group.

Steve Fennessy: So let's talk a little bit about social media, because it's certainly been the medium by which the word of this has spread and new adherents have come on board. Primarily, we're talking about Twitter and Facebook. And then there's also, of course, these sort of deeper sites, message boards like 4chan. So to what degree are are is social media responsible for the spread of these ideas?

Chris Joyner: Well, I mean, there were conspiracy theories before social media, obviously.

Steve Fennessy: Sure, sure.

Chris Joyner: In the spread of this particular web of conspiracy theories, you know, it is the secret sauce that has caused it to spread. Social media companies developed around an idea that they were going to be content neutral. It wouldn't be about whether what you said was right or wrong. They weren't going to make those calls. We've seen moves by social media companies to de-platform extremist right groups. And that's had an impact in, you know, sort of stemming the spread of some of these really, really harmful ideologies. In another way, it has also caused them to become more extreme and violent as they are forced into darker and darker areas of the Internet.

Steve Fennessy: Right.

Chris Joyner: So, I mean, I could see I could see, you know, a de-platforming effort stemming the spread of QAnon but QAnon becoming maybe even more militant.

Newscast: President Trump Tweeting congratulations today to QAnon conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene after she won a seat in the House. Now, Greene is known for some extreme and racist views. She's warned of a, quote, Islamic invasion. She did that after two Muslims won office. She has described Black people as, quote, slaves to Democrats.

Steve Fennessy: I'd like to talk a little bit about Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is going to be the next Congresswoman from the 14th District even though she hasn't been elected yet. She won the Republican primary and her Democratic opponent, who is not favored anyway, recently dropped out. She is a a vocal adherent of QAnon, no?

Chris Joyner: She has been. She has tried to distance herself from QAnon. Or she did during her campaign, in particular when she was in a primary runoff. She seems to be less concerned, doesnt really address the issue at all. Certainly she is and has been a personality in QAnon through her own social media presence. The videos that she has recorded and interviews she's given over the past several years have been heavily indebted to the QAnon conspiracy web.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Q is a patriot. We know that for sure, but we do not know who Q is, OK? So, now.

Chris Joyner: I think it's probably fair to say that she was the better candidate in terms of how she ran her campaign.

Steve Fennessy: Right.

Chris Joyner: She ran as an outsider. She ran against the media. These are not problems for voters in that area that that went for Trump in in a very big way in 2016. And he ran on those same themes.

President Donald Trump: Well, I don't know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate. But I don't know much about the movement.

Steve Fennessy: Also interesting is that they're they're disavowed among some mainstream political figures, but not all mainstream political figures, including, most notably the President of the United States. To what degree has has President Trump's refusal to disavow them or to speak out against them really in any way lit a fire under them?

Chris Joyner: You know, the president's handling of questions about QAnon has been very encouraging for people inside the QAnon movement. You know, they see this as real evidence of the truth of what they believe, right? That he is actively fighting this deep state cabal. What is amazing is he didn't even have to do that, really. I mean, because they were taking all sorts of cues from his public appearances. You know, how he held his hands and moved his hands, to what tie he wore as all being secret coded messages to them. So he didn't even have to say anything but his decision to not, you know, to not say that it's absurd and ridiculous and no one should listen to these people as some high-ranking Republicans have said has been very encouraging to them.

Steve Fennessy: Does its prevalence and popularity concern you?

Chris Joyner: The growth concerns me because, as I said, it's it is impervious to facts and it is hard for people to to draw themselves out of because it is so affirming to be a part of it. And so that rapid growth bothers me. The other thing that bothers me is that it's now an international movement.

Newscast: QAnon conspiracy theories are spreading overseas, popping up in Berlin at a protest against coronavirus restrictions.

Reporter: They're chanting Lugenpresse, which means basically fake news.

Newscast: Most European QAnon believers are new to this conspiracy theory. Their skepticism of the coronavirus acted as a kind of gateway to QAnon.

Steve Fennessy: So, Chris, wheres all this going? Coming up on a presidential election. What happens if President Trump is reelected? What happens if Joe Biden is our next president? How how do either of these outcomes affect the trajectory of QAnon?

Chris Joyner: I really think that in some ways, QAnon it will be unaffected by the election.

Steve Fennessy: Either way?

Chris Joyner: Either way. I mean, if if the president wins a second term, they will factor that into the you know, the running web of conspiracies. If the president is defeated and leaves office, he could still very well be considered to be running a campaign against this cabal. Just as an outsider, you know. That I'm trying to imagine an area where it would peter out in the shortterm. But I'm not sure how that would happen. Now, I think there are ways that, technologically, it can be disrupted, and I imagine that we'll see some of that.

Steve Fennessy: So is QAnon like COVID, in a way? Is it something that we're just gonna have to live with for an indefinite period of time?

Chris Joyner: Hmm,well, that's kind of a depressing thought. You mean until we develop a vaccine?

Steve Fennessy: Well, I mean, kinda like like, what is the cure for mass delusion?

Chris Joyner:It's tough to say. We're all, we're we are attracted, as a culture, to conspiracy theories. And, you know, QAnon being such a buffet of conspiracy theories, it would be hard to imagine that well get shed of it here in the short term.

Steve Fennessy: Our thanks to Chris Joyner, an investigative reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I'm Steve Fennessy. This is Georgia Today, a production of Georgia Public Broadcasting. You can subscribe to our show GPB.org/GeorgiaToday or anywhere you get podcasts. Please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcast. Have a story idea? Connect with us at GeorgiaToday@GPB.org. Our producers are Sean Powers and Pria Mahadevan. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

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Georgia Today: Into The Dark Heart Of QAnon - GPB News