WHEN we think about a conspiracy theory – assuming it is one we don’t ourselves believe – it is easy to be dismissive. Why should we care if a few misguided people think the world is flat or the government is covering up evidence of aliens? Conspiracy theories feel like a niche problem, affecting the ignorant, that could be fixed with a fact check here and an algorithm tweak there.
The reality is very different. Millions of people worldwide have come to believe aspects of QAnon – a conspiracy theory that, when it began in 2017, claimed that then US president Donald Trump was battling a global Satanic paedophile ring led by his political rival Hillary Clinton. It has since expanded, pulling in everything from Bill Gates and vaccines to the 5G phone network and Davos, the location of the World Economic Forum’s elite annual conference in Switzerland. It has been linked to serious unrest in Australia, Canada and Germany, and has a firm following in many other nations – including in the UK.
Advertisement
Just as it isn’t restricted to one country, it isn’t restricted to one demographic or political persuasion. It seems to have as many women followers as men, and to have recruits from the political left and middle as well as right – people are just as likely to be drawn in by vegan or yoga influencers as they are by far-right YouTubers.
High intelligence is also no guarantee against being enticed: more than one winner of the Nobel prize has, in later life, been lured into ludicrous conspiracism. In other words, these ideas aren’t someone else’s problem. Anyone can be sucked in.
In the three years I spent investigating QAnon for my new book, I became increasingly convinced that conspiracy theories must be considered from a public health standpoint, more than as an issue of media literacy or misinformation. The harms of falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole are very real. Cancer patients can stop their treatment. Other people grow fearful of leaving their homes and some become isolated and alienated, including from their own families.
But it is how conspiracy theories emerge that really makes me think we need to consider them in public health terms. While some groups are more susceptible – such as young men and people interested in alternative medicine – there is no subsection of society with total natural immunity to conspiratorial thinking.
New online conspiracy theories or groupings tend to originate on fringe websites, like the notorious 4chan forum, which is generally viewed as something of a no-go area, with minimal moderation even of hateful content. But there are relatively few people on 4chan – a mere few hundred thousand at a time, versus 2 billion on Meta – that anything on there that doesn’t escape the site barely has an impact on the world.
4chan and its ilk are the digital equivalent of real-world viral reservoirs. The danger comes when these digital pathogens cross over into the internet’s answer to cities – Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. The vector here tends to be influencers: people seeking new content to boost their audience.
With QAnon, the big platforms waited too long before they took action – meaning that many, many more people were radicalised on Facebook and YouTube than ever were on 4chan. Getting someone to drop a conspiracy theory takes months or years, and may never succeed. We don’t have enough resources to get everyone out – prevention is the only option and hope. It is time to work out what a digital public health system that could help do this would look like, from vigilance to inoculation.
We will never eradicate online conspiracy theories, just as we will never eradicate the common cold. But we do need to learn to live with them.
James Ball is the author of The Other Pandemic: How QAnon contaminated the world
