Misinformation superhighway is hurting our country

The creation of the internet marked a big advance in human ingenuity. But when it comes to politics, it is pretty much a disaster, a spewing fountain of misinformation and delusion. Novelist Scott Turow may have put it best: “The internet has bred defiant communities of lunatics who once huddled in shamed isolation with their unsettling obsessions.”

There have always been conspiracy theorists, typically rightwing, paranoid and racist. From the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s to the Cold War-era John Birch Society, they’ve mostly been a product of loneliness, ignorance and fear of the other. The Birchers, for example, described President Dwight Eisenhower as an agent of the communist conspiracy. Only a traitor, you see, would have dispatched troops to bring about the “forced integration” of Little Rock Central High School.

It wasn’t until California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan characterized the Birchers as a “lunatic fringe” in the mid-1960s that the organization faded from view.

But even the Birch Society was relatively sane compared with QAnon. A December poll by NPR and Ipsos found “17% of Americans believed that the core falsehood of QAnon — that ‘a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media’ — was true.” Even more alarmingly, another “37% said they didn’t know whether the baseless allegation was true or not.”

That’s a bare majority. Alas, there aren’t enough psychiatric wards in the country to hold them all. So I’m hoping the second number is more a reflection of polling inadequacies and ignorance of QAnon than genuine confusion. Because otherwise, we’d all be doomed.

Is it reasonable to think Hillary Clinton participates in satanic sex rituals, murders kidnapped toddlers and drinks their blood? Or is that the delusional product of a twisted mind? Make that many twisted minds, torqued by social media. Writing in The Atlantic, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out that in the manifesto he published (where else?) online, the Buffalo supermarket shooter asked himself, “Where did you get your current beliefs?

“Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person.”

The killer, Haidt points out, “could not have found such an extreme … group in his small town 200 miles from Buffalo. But thanks to social media, he found an international fellowship of extreme racists who jointly worshipped past mass murderers and from whom he copied sections of his manifesto.”

Haidt also suspects that unhinged, unregulated social media are partly responsible for more tribalism, more violent rhetoric and less respect for law pretty much around the world.

Thanks to the growth of social media, he adds, “people could spread rumors and halftruths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. Even more important … was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone.”

Tell me about it. In 2016, I got threatening emails from Russian operatives claiming to have visited a defunct business with the same ZIP code as mine to gather intelligence to hunt me down. Not Vladimir Putin’s Ateam.

Maybe just as dangerous to our collective well-being as QAnon, however, is the “Facebook School of Medicine.” Frightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, many began doing what they called “research” online — Googling loaded topics like the perils of vaccines, the miracle drug ivermectin, etc. Disdaining “elitists” — that is, doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts — there’s no telling how many gullible souls they pushed into an early grave.