It is both strange and alarming what people will believe.

I remember talking to this game designer/tech genius I know and he was pointing out how something like Q-Anon basically had the feel of "A LARP gone awry." He got into a long technical explanation of the way game player misinterpretation could take on a life of its own and massively deviate from the game's design, completely under its own steam.

Since I talked to him (pre-Covid) others have picked up the same idea and now refer to it as "Conspiracy Fictioning."

A lot of stuff sounds false to me, perhaps because it has to be magnified through the lens of extremism in order to actually bubble to the surface of the information stream.