QAnon supporters face reckoning as Biden is sworn in as US president

A man wears a QAnon shirt in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Believers began to slowly splinter at the end of 2020 when new posts from Q, the anonymous individual at the centre of the system, stopped appearing on 8kun. — AFP

As the world watched Joe Biden being sworn in as the 46th president of the US, users in one corner of the Internet struggled to grasp what they were seeing.

In the few online spaces where they are still allowed to operate openly, followers of the loose-knit conspiracy theory known as QAnon reacted with a mixture of shock and horror as Biden put his hand on a Bible and was sworn into office by US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.