On the face of it, you might think that the QAnon conspiracy has largely disappeared from big social media sites. But that's not quite the case.

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True, you're much less likely to find popular QAnon catchphrases like "great awakening," "the storm" or "trust the plan" on Facebook these days. Facebook and Twitter have removed tens of thousands of accounts dedicated to the baseless conspiracy theory, which depicts former President Donald Trump as a hero fighting a secret battle against a sect of devil-worshipping pedophiles who dominate Hollywood, big business, the media and government.

Gone are the huge "Stop the Steal" groups that spread falsehoods about the 2020 US presidential elections. Trump is gone as well, banned from Twitter permanently and suspended from posting on Facebook until 2023.

But QAnon is far from winding down. Federal intelligence officials recently warned that its adherents could commit more violence, like the deadly Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. At least one open supporter of QAnon has been elected to Congress. In the four years since someone calling themselves "Q" started posting enigmatic messages on fringe internet discussions boards, QAnon has grown.

That's partly because QAnon now encompasses a variety of conspiracy theories, from evangelical or religious angles to alleged pedophilia in Hollywood and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, said Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's DFRLab who focuses on domestic extremism. "Q-specific stuff is sort of dwindling," he said. But the worldviews and conspiracy theories that QAnon absorbed are still with us.

Loosely tying these movements together is a general distrust of a powerful, often leftist elite. Among them are purveyors of anti-vaccine falsehoods, adherents of Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and believers in just about any other worldview convinced that a shadowy cabal secretly controls things.

For social platforms, dealing with this faceless, shifting and increasingly popular mindset is a far more complicated challenge than they've dealt with in the past.

These ideologies "have cemented their place and now are a part of American folklore," said Max Rizzuto, another researcher at DFRLab. "I don't think we'll ever see it disappear."

Online, such groups now blend into the background. Where Facebook groups once openly referenced QAnon, you'll now see others like "Since you missed this in the so called MSM," a page referencing "mainstream media" that boasts more than 4,000 followers. It features links to clips of Fox News' Tucker Carlson and to articles from right-wing publications such as Newsmax and the Daily Wire.

Subjects range from allegedly rampant crime to unfounded claims of widespread election fraud and an "outright war on conservatives." Such groups aim to draw followers in deeper by directing them to further information on less-regulated sites such as Gab or Parler.

When DFRLab analyzed more than 40 million appearances of QAnon catchphrases and related terms on social media this spring, it found that their presence on mainstream platforms had declined significantly in recent months. After peaks in the late summer of 2020 and briefly on Jan. 6, QAnon catchphrases have largely evaporated from mainstream sites, DFRLab found.

So while your friends and relatives might not be posting wild conspiracies about Hillary Clinton drinking children's blood, they might instead be repeating debunked claims such as that vaccines can alter your DNA.

There are several reasons for dwindling Q talk – Trump losing the presidential election, for instance, and the lack of new messages from "Q." But the single biggest factor appears to have been the QAnon crackdown on Facebook and Twitter. Despite well-documented mistakes that revealed spotty enforcement, the banishment largely appears to have worked. It is more difficult to come across blatant QAnon accounts on mainstream social media sites these days, at least from the publicly available data that does not include, for instance, hidden Facebook groups and private messages.

While QAnon groups, pages and core accounts may be gone, many of their supporters remain on the big platforms – only now they're camouflaging their language and watering down the most extreme tenets of QAnon to make them more palatable.

"There was a very, very explicit effort within the QAnon community to camouflage their language," said Angelo Carusone, the president and CEO of Media Matters, a liberal research group that has followed QAnon's rise. "So they stopped using a lot of the codes, the triggers, the keywords that were eliciting the kinds of enforcement actions against them."

Other dodges may have also helped. Rather than parroting Q slogans, for instance, for a while earlier this year supporters would type three asterisks next to their name to signal adherence to the conspiracy theory. (That's a nod to former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, a three-star general).

Facebook says it has removed about 3,300 pages, 10,500 groups, 510 events, 18,300 Facebook profiles and 27,300 Instagram accounts for violating its policy against QAnon. "We continue to consult with experts and improve our enforcement in response to how harm evolves, including by recidivist groups," the company said in a statement.

But the social giant will still cut individuals posting about QAnon slack, citing experts who warn that banning individual Q adherents "may lead to further social isolation and danger," the company said. Facebook's policies and response to QAnon continue to evolve. Since last August, the company says it has added dozens of new terms as the movement and its language has evolved.

Twitter, meanwhile, says it has consistently taken action against activity that could lead to offline harm. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, the company began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that it said were "primarily dedicated" to sharing dangerous QAnon material. Twitter said it has suspended 150,000 such accounts to date. Like Facebook, the company says its response is also evolving.

But the crackdown may have come too late. Carusone, for instance, noted that Facebook banned QAnon groups tied to violence six weeks before it banned QAnon more broadly. That effectively gave followers notice to regroup, camouflage and move to different platforms.

"If there were ever a time for a social media company to take a stand on QAnon content, it would have been like months ago, years ago," DFRLabs' Rizzuto said.

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The storming of the US Capitol is a jarring but natural product of years of violence and hateful rhetoric stoked by disinformation and conspiracy theories, experts on far-right extremism said as they pored over images of Wednesday's riot.

Members of far-right groups, including the violent Proud Boys, joined the crowds that formed in Washington to cheer on President Donald Trump as he urged them to protest Congress' counting of Electoral College votes confirming President-elect Joe Biden's win. Then they headed to the Capitol. Members of smaller white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups also were spotted in the crowds. Police were photographed stopping a man identified as a leading promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory from storming the Senate floor.

Online forums popular with Trump supporters lit up with gleeful posts about the chaotic scenes broadcast from the Capitol. Thousands of messages on Parler, a right-wing alternative to Twitter, included the hashtag #civilwar or other variations of the term.

"If you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention," said Integrity First for America executive director Amy Spitalnick. "We should all be horrified by this, but nobody should be surprised that this is happening."

Spitalnick's civil rights group is backing a federal lawsuit filed by victims of the violence that erupted at the August 2017 white nationalist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left a counterprotester dead. One of the far-right fringe figures who had been listed as a speaker at the Charlottesville rally was live streaming video of the Capitol melee on Wednesday.

Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet posted a video that showed Trump supporters in "Make America Great Again" and "God Bless Trump" hats milling around and taking selfies with officers who calmly asked them to leave the premises. The Trump supporters talked among themselves, laughed, and told the officers and each other: "This is only the beginning."

The crowd of Trump supporters at the Capitol also included adherents of the "Groyper Army," a loose network of white supremacists that includes "America First" podcaster Nick Fuentes.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said the mob's actions were "clearly consistent" with the conspiratorial rhetoric of QAnon, the baseless belief that Trump has been secretly fighting deep state enemies and a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibals operating a child sex trafficking ring.

"QAnon has been calling on this kind of madness for years," Greenblatt said.

Representatives of Facebook and Twitter said Wednesday that they were working to remove threats and calls for violence from the social media platforms.

But across both platforms, Trump supporters used the hashtag #StormTheCapitol to document the chaos with photos or video and praise the mob.

More than 1 million mentions of "civil war" and "storm the capitol" had appeared in Twitter posts by Wednesday night, according to an analysis by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL's Center on Extremism, said he spotted members of other white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups – the New Jersey European Heritage Association and Nationalist Social Club – among the pro-Trump crowds in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday. The storming of the Capitol is the "logical conclusion to extremism and hate going unchecked" during Trump's presidency, Segal said.

"We had conspiracy theories animating people to action on the ground. We had the mainstream and the extreme narratives meld," Segal said.

Proud Boys leader Henry "Enrique" Tarrio was arrested this week and ordered to stay out of Washington after he was accused of vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church last month. During a debate with Biden, Trump refused to criticize the Proud Boys, instead saying the group should "stand back and stand by."

Greenblatt called on social media platforms to immediately suspend Trump's accounts for violating their terms of service. Twitter later locked the president's account, demanding that he remove tweets excusing violence and threatening "permanent suspension."

"This is a dark day for democracy," Greenblatt said. "I never would have imagined in my lifetime that we would be witnessing armed protesters storming the halls of Congress."

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