What Does the ❌ Emoji on Twitter Mean?
By: Jackson Rawlings
Tags: Politics, Twitter, Social Media, Technology, Alt Right

If you’re like me and spend far too much time on Twitter, you’ll have likely recently noticed something appearing more and more frequently in your feed.

In the last month or so, profiles with an ❌ emoji somewhere in their names seem to have sprung up all over the place.

At first I thought it was just Americans, but then I started seeing it on Brits’ profiles too.

Digging a bit deeper into these profiles, I noticed they tended to have a few key things in common: they were pro-Trump and/or pro-Brexit. Anti-Islam. Quite disposed to using terms like libtard, snowflake, MAGA etc.

Yes, it would appear, the ❌ has very quickly become the hallmark of the Twitter alt-right.

Now, as an inquisitive fellow, I decided to find out a bit more about this apparently recent trend.

What does it mean? How did it start? How has it got so big so quickly?

An initial Google search provided no answers. There’s not yet been the slough of op-ed think-pieces puffing up and decrying the ‘worrying new trend’, like there was with the ‘Glass of Milk’ emoji/alt-right thing (which turned out to be a concerted trolling campaign).

When I began researching this, I expected a simple explanation, most likely involving Russian bots as everything does these days (and on that score, I certainly wasn’t wrong.)

What I didn’t expect to discover was links to one of the most bizarre conspiracy theorist fringes in all of InternetTown, a world of believers in celebrity pedophile rings and deep-state treason.

My initial research on Twitter threw up some interesting finds.

What I found, having trawled through hundreds of tweets from profiles with the ❌, was that it appeared to be being used by people who believed that their account had been “shadowbanned” from the platform, as the tweet below shows:

Shadowbanning is itself a contentious term. Certain sections of the alt-right believe that their tweets are being covertly hidden from their followers’ timelines through Twitter’s new algorithm, as a way to repress and prevent such views from spreading.

Effectively, those who believe they are being shadowbanned, operate in a strange, slightly Truman-show-esque world, where they believe a multi-million dollar organisation is micro-censoring specifically their words and opinions.

There is no evidence outside of the anecdotal evidence of these alt-right figures that shadowbanning is actually a practice that Twitter partakes in.

As Matthew Chapman explains:

But what the shadowbanning phenomenon, and its resulting ❌ movement shows is that many on the alt-right do buy in to the belief that their voices are “omertà” — that they are being oppressed and repressed by some grander political conspiracy.

It’s no coincidence then, that there is a big crossover between these Twitter alt-right ❌ers and another, equally worrying, and even more bizarre group: that of QAnon.

What in the hell is QAnon?

QAnon is what the South Park writers would come up with as the plotline for an episode about alt-right conspiracy theorists.

Take a dollop of Pizzagate. Throw in some deep-state “drain the swamp” guff. A sprinkling of illuminati/George Soros/Rothschild NWO nonsense. A false flag here, a “Hillary Clinton is the devil” there.

Voila, you have the beginnings of QAnon.

Essentially it boils to one core belief — that President Donald Trump has everything under control.

As this great explainer from Vox puts it:

“There’s no White House chaos at all; in fact, despite legal scandals and special counsel investigations and bile-laden tweets, everything, absolutely everything, is going just as Donald Trump intended it.”

You see, Donald Trump is actually working with Robert Mueller to expose systemic and institutional pedophile rings that have existed through every previous presidency. The reason the media is so against Trump is that he’s the first President to actually take these pedo-bastards to task. They’ve even infiltrated the media itself. Probably. And politics. And the rest of the deep state.

Hillary Clinton and Bill and Obama and Tom Hanks for some reason. They’re all in on it.

Of course it’s all complete and utter nonsense, but it’s beliefs and ideas like these to which QAnon is referring.

The initial threads of these ideas come from a supposed White House insider (some say it might even be Trump himself) called “Q” who every once in a while “drops” key information online relating to these ongoing cases in which Trump is supposedly fighting against this massive deep-state pedo conspiracy.

I mean, yeah.

Batshit.

Now ordinarily such conspiracy theories are left to fester in the lunatic fringes.

But in this case, the QAnon movement has permeated deep into the heart of both the online alt-right community and now even into the mainstream Trump supporting groups.

The problem links between QAnon and ❌

Not all ❌ers are QAnons and not all QAnons are ❌ers.

But there is a considerable crossover.

See that first Tweet above from @Magnifieri as an example.

Why does this matter?

Because while the alt-right ❌ers are reasonably politically dangerous and deluded on their own, throwing QAnon into the mix is a powderkeg.

You see, the QAnon movement is not for taking this pedo-overlord stuff lying down. Nope, if anything starts going wrong for Trump — impeachment, or election losses etc. — they will come out swinging.

Already, the QAnon movement has taken to vigilantism, setting up search parties for pedophile camps in the Arizona desert. Yes, really.

As Julia Wong mentions in her Guardian article on the movement:

“People respond very strongly to the threat of sexual violence against children. In 2016, a Washington DC pizza restaurant became collateral damage in the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory.”

If the last remaining political defender of their core beliefs, Trump, goes down, what are QAnons to do?

They will do whatever they deem necessary to defend themselves and their kids against the deep-state pedo threat.

This week, a group of QAnons appeared at a Trump rally in Florida:

There is now a whole new round of publicity around the QAnon philosophy, drawing in new subscribers to the theories from the wider Trump umbrella.

QAnon ideas of a deep state pedo ring, mixed with ❌er ideas of a conspiracy to silence them — that’s a bad combination.

How dare you silence the defenders of our children against pedophiles?

Still, while dangerous, these philosophies are disparate. It’s not one collective movement, being organised by some larger nefarious actor as a way to undermine the democratic process. Right?

Oh, wait, yes, here come the Russian bots.

Last year, Data Scientist conspirator0 discovered a pattern appearing with regard to Russian bot accounts on Twitter and their username formats:

It’s worth reading that entire thread for an explanation but essentially, a significant proportion of confirmed Russian-based bot accounts use the format of “Name” followed by 8 random numbers, as above.

Well, wouldn’t you just know it, accounts with that very same naming format have appeared all over Twitter, with ❌s in their display names and spouting QAnon conspiracy bullshit.

What a coincidence, eh?

That’s just a very small selection that took me half an hour or so to find, of what I imagine is a much larger network of Russian bot accounts all tweeting the same QAnon shit with the same ❌s all over the place.

The reason this ❌ movement has spread so fast then, is not because it caught the imagination of a few alt-righters.

Rather, it is yet again another concerted Russian psy-ops campaign intended to create chaos and disorder in the democratic systems of other nations.

Russia has intentionally undermined the political systems we’ve had in place in the West for decades, and they’ve done it entirely through the internet.

As Max Boot said in his Washington Post column earlier this year —

Russia has been waging war on the West for at least 10 years, and the West hasn’t bothered to notice.

I started this piece expecting Russian bots. I found a hell of a lot more, besides.

But still, in the end, it all comes back to Russian bots. It always does.

X marks the spot where democracy was under attack. Let’s hope it doesn’t also mark the spot where it dies.

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Jackson Rawlings is a political philosopher, writer and thinker with some big ideas about how we can change the world for the better.

You can read his Modern Socialist Manifesto here: