Her 71-year-old mother got 'sucked into' QAnon conspiracy theories, but Wordle is helping to pull her out

• One woman told Insider that her QAnon-obsessed mother is turning her energy towards Wordle.
• Wordle, the five-letter guessing game, has swept the Internet.

Erin was running out of patience with her mother's QAnon obsession.

"My mom thinks my sister and I have graphene in us or something from the (coronavirus) vaccine," Erin told Insider, referring to a QAnon conspiracy theory that vaccinated people have graphene oxide, a substance used in medicine and biotechnology, in their bodies. Erin requested she and her mother's names be changed to protect their privacy. "She believes the 5G stuff. Governments conducting weather warfare. She reads about all this stuff, then calls her closest friends to fill them in."

"We don't talk about conspiracies or even regular news anymore because it's become a minefield," she added.

Erin, 40, said her relationship with her 71-year-old mother, Lisa, took a turn when she introduced Wordle, the five-letter word game that has swept the Internet, into her life. Erin, who lives with Lisa in Gainesville, Florida, began playing and shared it with her mom, who initially blew her off because "she was always 'too busy' doom-scrolling."

Since distracting Lisa with Worlde, Erin said her mother has been noticeably happier and word games have kept her mother from sharing stories about celebrities drinking adrenochrome from babies.

"In recent days, she's spent up to 2 or 3 hours on word puzzles. It's not that she's quit reading and believing conspiracies, but she has been devoting far less time to it. I've noticed she's been in a perkier, happier mood, too," she said.

Erin couldn't have imagined her mother, a well-educated woman with two master's degrees, would fall for the QAnon movement, which revolves around a baseless far-right conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump was secretly fighting an elite "deep state" cabal of human traffickers. However, Lisa was also gullible, Erin said. She was gradually "sucked into" a whirlwind of conspiracy theories after a family member introduced her to QAnon in 2019.

When Erin's father died in 2021, Lisa lost the one person she would listen to and he "would have never gone for any of this nonsense," Erin said.

A deep dive and investment in conspiracy theories isn't something that randomly happens to someone, according to Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami and co-author of American Conspiracy Theories. Rather, people have preconceived tendencies and beliefs that make them susceptible to conspiracy theories.

"What made that person go to the internet in the first place to look into this thing? They didn't slip on a banana peel and become a QAnon believer," Uscinski told Insider.

According to Uscinski's research, only a certain percentage of people – he estimates 5 to 7% – will be predisposed to believe a certain type of anti-establishment conspiracy theory, he told Rolling Stone.

Belief in QAnon isn't widespread.

According to a 2020 Pew Research poll, 76% of Americans had never heard of the movement. The same poll found that 20% of respondents knew "a little" about the movement and 3% knew "a lot."

As for Erin's mother, Uscinski said he wouldn't "prescribe Wordle as a remedy for anything." However, her interest in the game "might suggest that perhaps some people have gotten into QAnon because it offers a game-like activity, and perhaps if they find a substitution, they'll move on from it," Uscinski said.

"Now with that said, that doesn't change anything about who they are as a person or what their beliefs are."

Another difficult aspect, Uscinski said, is the number of conspiracy theories seems to be endless.

Even if you convince a believer that a particular theory is wrong, "they probably still believe in a hundred others. So, then you just get stuck playing this game of whack-a-mole because you're not really dealing with the underlying cause," Uscinski said. "There's still someone who's attracted to conspiracy theories for whatever reason, and unless you address that, you're not really doing anything."

Erin has already considered what will happen if Lisa gets bored of playing Wordle and resumes spending most of her time on QAnon.

"My fear is that it won't last. She plays so much, she may burn herself out," Erin said. "I certainly hope that it lasts. I have considered what I might introduce next, but I haven't found anything that I think she would love. Not yet."