Conspiracy theories

For the last two years or so, fake news has been all over the, well, news, often used as an accusation by a political camp against another.

But fake news has been with us for the longest time, starting out as gossip in small societies and then increasing in scale as the mass media emerged and grew into what they are today, in many ways a monster that knows no limits when using the internet and social media.

One type of fake news that has become extremely dangerous and needs to be fought more aggressively is the conspiracy theory, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a theory built “on the belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event.”

Conspiracy theories take many forms, and have many “manufacturers.” For example, totalitarian governments have found it useful to convince their citizens that a dictatorship is necessary because outside forces are conspiring to destroy them.

Other conspiracy theories are begun, and spread, by groups with particular interests or prejudices, like those that came about right after 9/11 with stories that someone’s neighbor’s friend noticed that “many” Muslims did not show up for work on the day of the bombings.

YouTube

A very recent example was the shooting in a Florida school where 17 people were killed. Almost immediately after the shooting, Alex Jones of the rightwing InfoWars group put up a YouTube video claiming it was staged by actors to justify stricter regulations on gun ownership. YouTube eventually took down the video, but not before it had gone viral.

Besides the malevolent intentions of those who start conspiracy theories, there is a ready market out there for them. Psychologists have long pointed out that we seek out news, especially sensational news, and share the (mis)information if it is aligned with our own biases and prejudices. So if someone is anti-Muslim or fearful of Muslims, he or she would have been more likely to believe those 9/11 rumors.

In other cases, people are drawn to conspiracy theories because these are alarming, and then spread the stories thinking they are being helpful.

Culture plays a role as well, with some societies more prone to “conspiracism.” The title of historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” says it all: Starting from the time of the American Revolution, Americans want to believe that conspiracies are part of the unfolding of history. It’s not surprising that they have conspiracy theories about their own government suppressing the truth on nearly everything, from the assassination of presidents like John F. Kennedy to extraterrestrials.

More relevant for developing countries like the Philippines is political scientist and anthropologist James Scott’s proposition that gossip and rumors are “weapons of the weak”—deployed when a group feels oppressed and cannot openly talk about its grievances. These stories often incorporate conspiracy theories.

We see then that conspiracy theories can be very complicated, used by the powerful as well as the powerless. In the latter’s case, they can actually end up being manipulated by the oppressors, who may plant the rumors in the first place to divide them, or to win their loyalty.

Facebook and YouTube have been heavily criticized for allowing these conspiracy theories to spread. Last Tuesday YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that her company would do something about these “internet conspiracies” through “information cues.” Here, anyone who clicks on a video with a conspiracy theme would be linked as well to Wikipedia articles that provide the facts. That move was praised to some extent, but also criticized as weak, considering that conspiracy theories spread almost immediately, sometimes even during a disaster. Also, people who want to believe conspiracies are not about to be convinced by a facts-based Wikipedia (which, incidentally, has also been used by conspiracy theorists but has stricter controls).

Fire!

I’ve had to deal with conspiracy theories every time we have a fire at the University of the Philippines Diliman, as we did last week at the UP Shopping Center. Most social media posts were sympathetic, asking how people can help, but there were also nasty posts saying the fire was UP’s “karma” because its students keep holding rallies. Other postings claimed the fire was intentional to allow big businesses to come in.

It’s sad that conspiracy theories tend to follow disasters—from fires to school shootings—reinforcing mistrust and prejudice instead of getting people to work together for rehabilitation, rebuilding and disaster prevention itself.

Amid the finger-pointing and conspiracy theories around fires, we forget that some of the most destructive fires start out with individual carelessness. It can be an old overheated fan, a hose carelessly connected to an LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) canister which then explodes, or even the refusal of a few persons to comply with rules on shutting down electricity at night in certain buildings on campus. All that happened in UP Diliman’s fires, but no one cares about those lapses, and even oppose administrative measures to strictly enforce fire safety rules.

Conspiracy theories distract us from a basic fact: Even the best electrical systems mean nothing if we do not develop a sense of collective responsibility.

Beyond the fires, our national psyche is being battered by all kinds of conspiracy theories, with dire consequences yet to come.

Wojcicki announced the new YouTube feature, which she called “information cues,” during a talk with WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Here’s how it will work: If you search and click on a conspiracy theory video about, say, chemtrails, YouTube will now link to a Wikipedia page that debunks the hoax alongside the video. A video calling into question man’s landing on the moon might be accompanied by the official Wikipedia page on the Apollo moon landing in 1969. Wojcicki says the feature will only include current conspiracy theories that have “significant debate” on the platform.

The problem with the recommendation algorithm is that it feeds users ever more extreme content, sometimes straying from the subject of the original search. For example, if you search for a video on the Holocaust, YouTube might recommend that you watch one about how the tragedy is a hoax. The recommendation system isn’t designed to ensure you’re informed; its main objective is to keep you viewing YouTube videos for as long as possible.

mtan@inquirer.com.ph