Duluth Woman Uses Instagram To Fight Against QAnon Conspiracies

DULUTH, MN — A former teacher has taken up the fight against the growing tide of misinformation and conspiracy theories that have plagued social media feeds across the country, and she’s doing it one Instagram video at a time.

Since October 2020, former United States government teacher Sharon McMahon has been using social media to give followers a quick lesson in civics — covering topics like the constitutionality of a mask mandate to campaign promises politicians make during an election. In each of her videos McMahon, a resident of Duluth, Minn., stresses that she’s not taking any sides in the political debate.

“My goal with these nonpartisan videos is to provide you with factual information that does not favor one position over another,” she said in her video about the Electoral College. “[These videos] just gives you information to make your own decision.”

Her humorous, straightforward approach has netted McMahon a following of nearly 430,000 people. She goes on in her video about the Electoral College on why it’s important ballots are counted methodically and not have the results of an election called for immediately.

“Election officials are under no obligation to count votes quickly, they are under every obligation to count votes accurately,” McMahon said. “Winning an election in five minutes with 120% of the mathematically impossible vote? That’s dictator level, we don’t want that.”

McMahon told CNN that she started the videos as a response to the amount of misinformation that began to creep up into her social media feeds in the lead up to the 2020 election.

In each of her videos McMahon goes into detail on a topic, sometimes done at the request of her followers, and debunks the misinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding them.

Her videos have such an impact that McMahon the news network that she even heard from a handful of people who used to believe in QAnon conspiracy theories until they saw her Instagram page.

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that traffics in misinformation. Those who subscribe to it believe a group of satanic child traffickers control world governments and the media. They also believe that Donald Trump was elected president in order to expose the nonexistent cabal.

Many of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 had ties to QAnon and even one of the insurrectionists, a man from Arizona named Jacob Chansley, was dubbed the “QAnon Shaman.”

"I understand that I can't reach everybody," McMahon said to CNN. "But those 10 people are not going to be out there spreading misinformation anymore."

In addition to her informational videos, McMahon also posts clips online where she often lambastes misinformation and conspiracy theories that are posted online from vague sources and questionable evidence and positions herself as a counter to random Facebook comments.