I agree this is a significant point. My view is that years ago, Q was too esoteric and inaccessible to most people. It didn’t pose a big threat because it didn’t have a broad penetration into mainstream, even among Trump supporters. The MSM made a few attempts to lightly set the narrative about it, to calm the questions of their sleeping audience, and then left it alone so it got forgotten.

Q had minimal presence on social media, except for some posts or videos that the normies are classically trained to identify as conspiracy theory nonsense. So I think the “censorers” felt it was safer to let public be exposed to it, see there was “nothing there” and let them move on naturally. The theory was probably that when they were presented with Q again they would remember the earlier experience and reject Q without a second thought.

Now, however is a different story. Way too many people are scratching their heads because the cognitive dissonance is throwing up excessive “glitches in the system.” Now people are more prone to re-examine past experiences in an attempt to make sense of how we got here. They are more open to reevaluate things they may otherwise have rejected. That is extremely dangerous because many times the MSM lies are only delicately concealed with one or two thin layers of narrative. Plus the fact that once word gets out that something is being censored, it tends to make people more curious. So they needed to use that only when really necessary.

Basically, just like how there were stages in censorship after the US elections, there are varying strategies in how they address certain issues or events. It was perhaps more advantageous at that time to leave Q alone and let most normies get inoculated to it. They felt confident their narrative would hold, for that time. It’s a very different situation now and I think this is actually a sign of weakness in the MSM.

And to those saying that Q is a honeypot to catch the patriots- sometimes that fear comes up to me. But the reality is, there’s an awful lot of patriots and they are not easily subdued so “they” have their work cut out for them.