While you are perusing this misinformation, you can buy products from InfoWars, everything dietary supplements, including a medicine for Covid-19, T-shirts, hats, and coffee cups. You can even get food supplies to keep in store for the coming revolution. I don’t know whether Jones actually believes the ideas that he peddles, but he certainly pulls in a lot of followers. InfoWars attracts 10 million visitors a month, a lot more than a straight news site would attract. People who believe in Jones’s misinformation have made him a wealthy man.
QAnon is an anonymous website that also spreads false information. According to them North Korea’s Kim Jon Un was installed and is controlled by the CIA. Germany’s leader, Angela Merkel, is Hitler’s granddaughter. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros were involved in a plot to overthrow President Trump. They were also involved in a child sex-trafficking ring. The Rothschild family leads a satanic cult.
QAnon is anonymous, though it supposedly is run by a deep member of the CIA with the highest security clearance. Margorie Taylor Greene believes the QAnon stories. In the last election she was elected to represent Georgia in Congress. Donald Trump’s lies are too numerous to list. According to the Washington Post, which has been keeping track, Trump had made over 20,000 false or misleading statements in the first three and a half years in his administration.
All three of these have had their lies picked up and further spread by the social media. Trump notoriously releases some of his misinformation on twitter. Rather than conduct government business through official channels, he often makes his announcements by a tweet.
One has to wonder whether Trump’s false statements are delusional or a cynical disregard for the truth when he thinks a lie will serve his purposes better. Either way, these misstatements, along with his incompetence, demonstrate how unfit he is for the office he holds. At any rate, over 700 million people voted for him in the recent election and vast numbers of citizens are convinced that the election was somehow stolen from him.
What have we come to? That so many people have fallen for the lies of these charlatans? Unfortunately, it is not just these malignant forces that have captured the minds of Americans. The social media echoes the lies and false conspiration that Alex Jones et al project. From time to time Facebook or Twitter will temporarily suspend Alex Jones or label Donald Trump’s accounts as less than accurate. But it is usually too little, too late. Millions of people depend on sources like Facebook rather than traditional sources for their news.
It is not enough to try to reform the social media. The answer lies elsewhere. In a future post we will look at how we can minimize the damage done by these malevolent forces.
