Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect
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The psychology of conspiracy theory believers is not yet well understood.
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The first Tea Party was in Santa Monica, California, and it had a lot of liberals in it. There were lots of anti-banking types, and 9/11 Truthers, only half of them were that conservative, it was a weird mix.
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“People who supported the losing side in an election are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that are supposedly orchestrated by the winning side.”
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in the paper: “Fake News: Incorrect, but Hard to Correct,” De Keersmaecker and Roets note three findings: 1) When people learn their attitudes are based on false information, they adjust them. 2) People low (versus high) in cognitive ability adjust attitudes to lesser extent. 3) Adjusted attitudes remained biased for people low in cognitive ability.21
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“You can change minds by debunking, but it’s harder to do with stupid people.”
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There are important lessons to learn from reading the official documents from around that time.6 Firstly, that the power structure of the government and the military was (and is) not of one mind. It is made up of people (all men back then) with their own differing experiences, skills, ideologies, and motivations. Many different plans for both sabotage and propaganda were suggested and discussed. The fact that false pretexts (False Flags) were suggested at all indicates that some people were willing to consider them. Many in the military and the government were probably willing to implement ...more
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Someone told me that some people are like irrational jealous wives, they think you are cheating on them, and if you say you were at a bar with a friend then they say that’s exactly the excuse a cheating husband would use. The thinking just gets crazier with bigger reasons not to believe someone. I realized the crazy wife in that story was like the Flat Earth people. This made me think I should listen to the Globe Earth point of view, and eventually I began so see that it made more sense.
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I sometimes try to help other people. But I honestly think some people can’t get out of their comfort zone and they will never change. They don’t look for truth, they look for something easy for them to accept or that makes them feel special. I don’t have a lot of hope for the Flat Earthers.
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Don’t mock them. That will worsen the situation, it will make the person feel even more isolated and have trust issues.
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if you want to help someone who is down the rabbit hole you really should make them feel like you are not putting them down for what they believe. Make them feel that you are open to what they say, even if you know they are absolutely wrong. You might open a door to reason for them.
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Conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a “crippled epistemology,” in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources. Those who hold conspiracy theories do so because of what they read and hear.
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But, as with Morgellons, actual mental illness can play a role in conspiracy thinking, both as a root cause, and as a complication. Some people do actually believe in conspiracies because of their mental illness, and some people have their mental illness made worse because of their beliefs in a conspiracy theory.
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I have occasionally encountered people on the internet who are potentially mentally ill, and a few times in person. My general strategy when dealing with someone who I suspect is mentally ill is to briefly treat them as if they are not. Assume the best, and see what happens. But as soon it seems likely that they are in fact mentally ill then I will not continue to engage them about conspiracy theories.
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To have a fruitful political discussion with your relatives over Thanksgiving you need to sidestep the polarization, the spin, and the conspiracy theories. Instead focus on mutual understanding, focus on facts, and focus on the true differences between you, and the true similarities.
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Jenna Abrams was a popular figure on Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign, amassing over 70,000 followers.1 Abrams, tweeting as @Jenn_Abrams, started out in 2014 with a constant stream of tweets that reflected the populist right-wing politics of a demographic that would end up being a core part of Donald Trump’s base. Her more popular tweets were increasingly retweeted by establishment figures like Donald Trump Jr. and Kellyanne Conway (then Trump’s campaign manager). The problem is Jenna Abrams never really existed. According to congressional investigators the account was in fact the ...more
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In January 1998, CNN interviewed retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, who described the role of “subversion” in Soviet intelligence: The heart and soul of the Soviet intelligence [was] not intelligence collection, but subversion: Active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs. To make America more vulnerable to the anger and distrust of other ...more
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former FBI special agent Clint Watts, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute program on national security. Watts described the scope of the Active Measures program: While Russia certainly hopes to promote western candidates sympathetic to their worldview and foreign policy objectives, winning a single election is not their end goal. Russian Active Measures hope to topple democracies through the pursuit of five complementary objectives. 1) Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance. 2) Foment or exasperate divisive political fissures. 3) Erode trust between citizens ...more
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RT, the Russian propaganda outlet, has published many articles and done many interviews on the topic of 9/11 Truth and other conspiracy theories, providing outlets with wide reach to Truthers like Richard Gage and Jesse Ventura: 10 March 2010, RT: “Americans continue to fight for 9/11 Truth.”3 Richard Gage is the founder of ‘Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth,’ which consists of more than 1,100 professionals who say it was not planes that caused three buildings to collapse at the World Trade Center. “The buildings were demolished by explosives. More than one thousand architects and ...more
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RT frequently interviews Gordon Duff, who has supported claims that Sandy Hook was a staged “false flag,”5 regularly referring to him as a military expert. In the opinion section of RT there are articles on Chemtrails,6 and even an article from a believer in the Flat Earth theory.7 For a pseudo-mainstream news source (RT claims a weekly audience of 8 million people in the US),8 there’s a lot of bunk being spread around.
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But regardless of the present details it is without doubt that extensive Russian programs of propaganda and subversion have existed in the past, and will continue to exist in the future. While we might view this as a largely Russian-specific phenomenon, it’s going to be a part of (if not in practice already) the cyber arsenal of any country, large or small.
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We know about the trolls like Jenna Abrams, but what we are going to be seeing more and more of, and where the future of disinformation is going, and where the spread of conspiracy theories is heading, is artificial intelligence and bots.
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Zeynep Tufekci in her TED talk on the dystopian future of social media algorithms says: We are not programming anymore. We are growing [artificial] intelligence that we don’t truly understand.14
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These algorithms are quickly becoming the primary route down the rabbit hole. To a large extent this has already happened, but it’s going to get far, far worse. Tufekci described what happened when she tried watching different types of content on YouTube. She started out by watching videos of Donald Trump rallies. I wanted to write something about one of [Donald Trump]’s rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me, and autoplaying to me, white supremacist videos, in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme. If ...more
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The giants of social media have unwittingly developed algorithms, developed a matrix, that is finely tuned to trap people in that loop, suck them down the rabbit hole, and keep them there. Even if your friend was never into conspiracy theories, he might have some personality factors that make him a bit more likely to believe certain videos, factors the algorithm can latch onto.
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The algorithm targets a demographic of one—that person, perhaps your friend, perhaps you. The results are tailored for that one person, and only that one person sees the breadcrumbs that the artificial intelligence is scattering at the entrance to their own privately curated rabbit hole.
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The simplest defense against AI taking over the soul of the country is to restrict social media accounts to actual people.
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In 2016 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, scoffed at the idea that trolls posting fake news on Facebook would have any impact on the presidential election, calling it “crazy”: Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience. … There is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news.17 But in 2017, after internal investigations ...more
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One central tension at Facebook has been that of the legal and policy teams versus the security team. The security team generally pushed for more disclosure about how nation states had misused the site, but the legal and policy teams have prioritized business imperatives.19
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Facebook chose outside agencies to do fact-checking to avoid the accusation of bias. People of all stripes distrust Facebook. Conservatives think it has a liberal bias, liberals and libertarians think it’s spying on them for corporations, conspiracy theorists think it’s part of a plot to identify and track them before they are herded into FEMA camps.
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Fact checkers like Snopes, FactCheck, and PolitiFact are already considered suspect. Facebook teaming up with Snopes is unfortunately going to be a laughable concept for someone who thinks both organizations have been “debunked” as Illuminati tools.
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To be certified by Poynter means that an organization has been vetted and found to conform to a quite rigorous checklist that ensures they are nonpartisan, fair, transparent, open, and honest. This is reflected in the IFCN code of principles: 1. Nonpartisanship and fairness 2. Transparency of sources 3. Transparency of funding and organization 4. Transparency of methodology 5. Open and honest corrections
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The most effective way to bring that information to your friend is with honesty and with respect. Mocking and harsh criticism do not work because people push back when they feel threatened. Even if you feel their position is ludicrous, respectful disagreement works better than derision.
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Where they draw the demarcation line is important—both for understanding them and as a tool for focusing your debunking efforts. A small shift in where the line is drawn can result in a profound change in perspective, and the start of a slow drift in the right direction. This is especially true if you can show them that their sources of information are now on the other side of the line.
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Conspiracy Theory—An alternative explanation for an event that involves a secret plot, usually involving high levels of government or shadowy powers. Often considered pejorative, sometimes considered to be a phrase invented by the CIA, which it wasn’t.
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Crisis Actors—Normally refers to actual actors who play the roles of victims (and sometimes villains) in genuine practice drills for a crisis such as an earthquake or a terrorist attack. Conspiracists claim that real victims of events such as the Boston Marathon Bombing were actually Crisis Actors, going as far as suggesting that amputees wore fake legs, which they removed when a “smoke bomb” went off, and then smeared the stump with blood.
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Disinformation—Deliberately propagated false information. Usually a word used by conspiracists to describe evidence that conflicts with their theory. Metabunk.org and Snopes are considered disinformation by many conspiracists, as are most regular news outlets.
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Morgellons—An informal name used for a generally self-diagnosed unofficial medical condition characterized by itching, open sores on the skin, and the finding of fibers on or in the skin and sores. There’s a great deal of variation between individual cases, but doctors generally agree that the finding of fibers is generally people mistaking clothing fibers of hair for some kind of pathogen. A portion of the Morgellons community believe it is related to some kind of government operation, possibly related to Chemtrails.