A fraction too much FICTION
Eccentricities or misinformation? After the storming of the US Capitol, Samantha Trenoweth asks, how dangerous are conspiracy theories?
secrets & lies, the cult of conspiracy theories
Jitarth Jadeja is a nice guy. He’s 33, he lives in a comfortable house in suburban Sydney with his family, who he loves and who emigrated from India when he was a tot. He cares about things like a fair go for all Australians, looking out for your neighbour, respecting your parents, being a good friend. But two years ago, Jitarth wanted to see a whole bunch of people, whom he’d never met, publicly hanged. Two years ago he believed that Hillary Clinton was at the centre of a satanic paedophile ring, and admits with deep regret that he’d have been happy if she’d been murdered.
“It’s a mass delusion that’s being passed from person to person,” Jitarth says now, looking back to the two-and-ahalf years he spent obsessively following and genuinely believing the conspiracy theories he read online, including the now infamous QAnon, which fuelled the insurrection at the US Capitol in February. “It’s like a coronavirus of the mind,” he adds. “It’s highly infectious, has different strains and there’s a race to find a cure before it mutates into something much more lethal.”
That thousands of people, driven by disinformation and delusion, could attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government has certainly brought conspiracy theories into the political spotlight. But those who study them insist there’s nothing new here.
A brief history of lies
“Conspiracy theories have always been with us,” says Karen Douglas, Professor of Social Psychology, at the University of Kent in the UK. “There’s even evidence of conspiracy theorising in ancient Rome.”
Some of these theories have been relatively harmless: Princess Diana is alive and well in a secret island paradise with Dodi Al Fayed, or the Duchess of Sussex has been replaced by a robot, or Stanley Kubrick faked the 1969 moon landing in a film studio in the Mojave Desert. Others, however, have had significant and sinister repercussions.
In the 14th century, the bubonic plague killed almost one-third of the people in Europe. The plague was actually spread by fleas, but terrified Christians blamed local Jews, whom they massacred, destroying entire communities. Right around the world, everything from the failure of crops to a child born with a disability has been blamed on women – the witch trials of the 17th century are just one example.
In the 18th century, surging political instability gave conspiracy theories a kick along. The Illuminati was once a real secret society made up of Bavarian intellectuals whose aim was to spread Enlightenment ideas such as the primacy of reason, liberty, tolerance and constitutional government. The group lasted only a few years but their identity was seized upon by conservatives looking for a scapegoat for the French Revolution, and some conspiracy theorists believe the Illuminati is still at work today.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first published in 1903, purporting to be the transcript of a meeting of powerful Jewish leaders, secretly plotting to rule the world. It was subsequently found to be a work of fiction, dreamed up by the Russian secret police, but the toxic mix of Illuminati-style global domination with anti-Semitic prejudice proved difficult to shift. It was fundamental to Nazi propaganda, which resulted in the best-documented act of genocide in history.
During the Cold War, the secret society conspiracy idea was repurposed by American conservatives and played a role in McCarthyist anti-communist propaganda.
Then, in the 1960s, an anarchic new spoof religion, called Discordianism, aimed to seed chaos by spreading disinformation and practical jokes. In this spirit, two Playboy journalists, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert
Shea, penned a fictional trilogy called The Illuminatus! Conspiracy, which suggested that everyone from Martian
invaders and Freemasons to rock and roll singers and the authors themselves were members of the Illuminati. The best-selling books (in combination with a little drug-fuelled paranoia and nuclear-age terror) gave conspiracy theories a momentous popularity boost.
Which brings us to the present day and this “fake news” era in which significant numbers of people are having difficulty separating fiction from reality once again.
According to a Pew Research survey, roughly a quarter of adults in the United States see “some truth” in the theory that the coronavirus outbreak was secretly engineered by “powerful people”. Other studies have found that 30 per cent of Americans believe their own government was behind the 9/11 terror attacks, and roughly the same number believe Barack Obama was not born in the US. (All these theories have been disproved beyond doubt.)
Nor is this an exclusively American problem. One recent study found that around 60 per cent of British people believed in at least one conspiracy (from ‘Prince Charles is a vampire’ to ‘climate change is a hoax’). And while only 13 per cent of Australians own up to similar beliefs, it’s thought that the fear and isolation around COVID-19 could nudge that number higher.
“Conspiracy theories seem to peak in times of crisis,” says Professor Douglas. “This is a reason why we are seeing more conspiracy theories now than in recent years.”
Down the rabbit hole
In December 2016, Jitarth was struggling. He’d been living with epilepsy for much of his life but there were other challenges too. Plainly he was bright but he had trouble concentrating and his university work was suffering. He was also prone to depression and fluctuating moods. He’d just been diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder), which he felt explained some but not all of his problems.
Jitarth had always been interested in economics. In 2011-12, he’d gone on university exchange to the US and become fascinated by American politics, which he continued to follow when he returned home.
“I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016,” he explains, “because he was talking about income inequality and wealth inequality. I think that’s a core issue and Bernie was the only one talking about it.”
Jitarth was disappointed when Sanders lost in the Democrat primaries to Hillary Clinton. “Then the WikiLeaks stuff came out,” he continues, “and then Trump’s victory and being diagnosed with ADHD came within the space of a month, and that shattered everything. It shattered my understanding of myself and my view of society. How was the media capable of, if not lying, being so wrong? I started to wonder, if we could all have been so wrong about Trump, then maybe there were other things we’d been wrong about, and that opened my mind to conspiracy theories.”
Jitarth stopped following the mainstream media. Instead he was glued to InfoWars, a far-right website and chat show hosted by American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
“I was also socially isolated,” says Jitarth. “I was feeling so overwhelmed. I couldn’t handle keeping up with my friends or with uni. I basically absconded from my social circle. For the next two years, I slowly spiralled down this conspiracy rabbit hole.”
Much has been written about the social media algorithms that channel users deeper and deeper into extremist content. Those algorithms were at work on Jitarth’s social media and YouTube feeds.
“Not only can anyone just make something up and spread it quickly on the internet, without being bound by evidence,” says Professor Ullrich Ecker from the School of Psychological Science at the
University of Western Australia.
“Not only does social media connect us very efficiently and spread information very quickly, but social media uses algorithms which have one purpose only – to maximise our engagement [i.e. our time online] and hence advertising revenue [for both the platforms and their content providers]. Social media algorithms don’t really care about veracity.”
Moreover, social media can introduce fringe opinions to wider communities overnight.
“We know from decades of research that people hold an opinion to the extent that they think it is widely shared by others,” says Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist from the University of Bristol. “If everyone around me thinks the Earth is round, I’m quite sensibly going to believe the same thing. That worked really well while we didn’t have social media because, if I’m the only one in my village who believes the earth is flat, chances are everyone’s telling me I’m the village idiot and I will be quiet about it. But the moment you have Facebook with a billion users, I can go online and it doesn’t matter how absurd my opinion is – bam – I’m surrounded by hundreds of other people who share that view and my belief is reinforced. This can only happen on social media. In real life you’d never meet those other people because there are so few out there.”
Jitarth was struck by two guests on InfoWars who posted online under the names Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe. In reality they were a 31-year-old American, Coleman Rogers, and Paul Furber, a web programmer from South Africa. They had set themselves up as experts on the cryptic posts that had been appearing online by someone who claimed to be a high-ranking military officer and went by the name Q. According to an investigation by NBC, these men, in collaboration with YouTuber Tracy Diaz, either created Q (an accusation which they strongly deny) or plucked his posts from obscurity to create a phenomenon called QAnon from which they, and others, profited.
Today, Jitarth comes across as a savvy young man but he swallowed the QAnon conspiracy theory “hook, line and sinker. It was like a drug,” he says.
“There’s no one belief of Q but this is generally the idea,” he begins when asked to explain some of the wildest ideas he accepted. “There’s a satanic paedophile cabal that controls the world and Donald Trump is being backed by military intelligence to build something called Space Force, which is working on a secret weapon to take down this cabal. I was also of the belief that there was a race of bird-like beings from the fifth dimension, called Blue Avians, who were secretly behind military intelligence, and they were saving the world from fifth-dimensional reptilians controlling the cabal.”
It sounds like a fairly massive leap of faith for a formerly rational economics student, but Jitarth insists it was “a step-by-step process, and it gets crazier and crazier, until the sky’s the limit.”
He was not alone. A poll in the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election found that half Donald Trump’s supporters believed in the basic tenets of QAnon. Trump rallies and the storming of the Capitol were littered with QAnon signage, T-shirts and slogans. A faction within the movement has now even founded a neo-charismatic QAnon church and begun interpreting the Bible through its paranoid prism. This comes as no surprise to Jitarth.
“The fiction Q has created is an existential battle between good and evil,” he says. “This is not like a battle between nations or philosophies, it is a battle between heaven and hell, God and the Devil. They believe that these people in the cabal are not just killing
babies and drinking their blood, they want your soul. It’s ludicrous but that’s what they believe, and if you truly believed that, what wouldn’t you do?”
Who falls in?
Jitarth suspects that a combination of isolation, disappointment, depression and the stress of his ADHD diagnosis increased his vulnerability to these theories. He was later diagnosed with Bipolar 2, which explains his volatile emotions but not his sudden descent into conspiratorial thinking.
“I allowed my feelings to override my logical thought process,” he explains. “I wanted to believe. I suppose I was a prime candidate – disaffected, vulnerable and insecure. Q gave me purpose, meaning, and perhaps saddest of all, he gave me joy. I was happy that the world wasn’t actually as f***ed up as it seemed, that there were good guys out there fighting the good fight, that we could genuinely build a better future for all of humanity.”
While no particular personality is more susceptible than another to conspiracy theories, there are types of thinking that can make us more easily misled. According to Dr Carmen Lawrence, from the School of Psychological Science at the University of Western Australia, people who become absorbed by conspiracy theories have a greater tendency to engage in what’s called System One Thinking.
“They are more likely to jump to conclusions, using heuristics and biases, to have an emotional tone to their level of understanding, an unwillingness to embrace scientific explanations,” she told a forum hosted by The Conversation and the University of South Australia. “System One thinking is when we use all sorts of shortcuts because there’s an immediate need to make a decision, it’s emotionally fraught, we see patterns where there aren’t any, see agency where there isn’t any.”
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky puts it in a nutshell: “You can ask people, ‘what do you think is the best way to understand life?’ And there are a lot of people who say, ‘my gut feeling tells me more than all the scientific evidence’. Those people, and people who believe in magical thinking, are more susceptible to conspiracy theories.”
And that’s just the beginning of the journey. “Once people go down the rabbit hole,” he continues, “their thinking starts deviating from standard evidence-based cognition.
That’s when people start to accept contradictions. Most conspiracy theories are internally incoherent. People will say that Princess Diana isn’t really dead and that she was killed by MI5. It’s hard to be both dead and alive, but the fact that a conspiracy theory is completely incoherent doesn’t deter people from believing it.”
Times of crisis, like the present pandemic, also give rise to conspiratorial thinking.
“A pandemic is basically a factory for conspiracy theories,” says Professor Lewandowsky, “because a pandemic makes people think they
have lost control of their lives. If you think these random events are not random but the work of ‘bad people’, then it gives you an explanation, someone to blame, some comfort. We can even demonstrate this in experiments. If you get a number of people in the lab and take away their control in an experimental intervention, they will become conspiracy theorists. They will detect patterns that aren’t there in [groups of] dots.”
Jitarth agrees that conspiracies offer a sense of control and adds that they “also give meaning and purpose. They’re saying: ‘You’re special, you’re a hero, you know the truth, you can fight back. There’s a reason why, all your life, things have gone terribly badly’. It’s not just a conspiracy theory, it’s a conspiracy cult. People often fall into a cult because of a need for social contact and a desire to be part of a group.”
Professor Ecker believes that conspiracy theories also thrive in an information vacuum.
“In a global pandemic, people are genuinely scared and concerned, and they want answers,” he explains. “Unfortunately there’s still so much we don’t know about the virus and reliable sources take quite a long time to evaluate the situation and provide useful, evidence-based information. People have never had a lot of patience but now, with social media, they want their answers even more quickly, so they go out looking for them.”
And the answers they find aren’t always reliable. This time last year, an Essential poll of more than 1000 Australians reported that 20 per cent of respondents believed the number of COVID-19 deaths had been exaggerated by the media and governments. And 12 per cent believed it was definitely or probably true that the 5G wireless network was being used to spread the virus (neither of which has any basis in fact).
The danger zone
There was a time when belief in conspiracy theories was an amusing eccentricity. But in a pandemic, in a global environmental crisis, when democratic elections are at stake, spiralling disinformation seems a little dangerous. Should we be concerned?
Possibly, for a number of reasons. The first is that, according to Professor Ecker, “there are malicious actors out there who use social media as a tool to destabilise societies.” University of Southern California researchers collected 240 million US election-related tweets and found that “bots” or automated messaging devices, were producing 13 per cent of conspiracy-related content, and much of it was generated outside the US.
Another threat comes from industry. Professor Lewandowsky expresses concern that science-sceptical climate change conspiracies are “driven by ideology and by vested interests. We have an abundance of evidence that we’re facing an organised political campaign to deny the science,” he says. So are conspiracy theories dangerous? “Yes,” he answers emphatically. “Exposure to a conspiracy theory makes people less engaged in politics, more distrustful, less likely to reduce their carbon footprint. In the UK, some 70 or 80 mobile phone installations were damaged because of this nonsensical belief that 5G broadband is causing COVID-19.
So it can lead to violence in the extreme case as well.”
On December 4, 2016, Edgar Welch marched into a family pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong in Washington DC carrying an assault rifle, a handgun, a shotgun and a folding knife. Edgar, it turned out, had read online that Hillary Clinton was operating a satanic child slavery ring from the basement, and quite possibly drinking children’s blood. He threatened an employee, shot up a door, destroyed some computer equipment and quickly learned that the restaurant didn’t have a basement. The conspiracy theory was thoroughly disproved and Edgar was sentenced to four years in prison. Yet even now there are those who won’t disavow the fiction. The night before President Biden’s inauguration, a small crowd gathered outside the restaurant with pickets that read “Repent or Perish”.
As the victims of conspiracy theories mount, academics are scrambling for solutions. A massive increase in emphasis on critical thinking as early as primary school is high on the list of interventions, along with ‘pre-bunking’ programs (teaching internet users about conspiracy theories before they encounter them seems to take the gloss off) and finally some level of content moderation online. How successful these might be is still open for debate, however.
“My parents and grandparents lived through wars and depressions where society was turned upside down,” Dr Carmen Lawrence told the forum, sagely. “There was plenty of rumourmongering, as they called it then, and misinformation and conspiracy theories, culminating in the case of Germany in the extermination of six million Jews at least. So is this a worse time for misinformation? I don’t know. It feels like it but that’s because I’m here.
“We know from history that there are spikes of misinformation and conspiracy theories in times of great crisis. There’s no doubt we’re in such a time so we are going to see a spike of activity. Is it forever? I don’t think so … I suppose, like most human beings, I remain optimistic – stupidly so, in many respects – that we’ll take more action on climate change, get on top of the economic difficulties we confront and won’t continue to trash the planet. But I’m not so optimistic that I can’t see the role of misinformation and conspiracy theories in making that a much more difficult task.”