INFOWARS

From Alex Jones’s InfoWars we can learn about the involvement of the U S government in 9/11. The Sandy Hook shootings never happened. The survivors of the Stoneham Douglas High School shootings were crisis actors. The government has programs that can control weather. Prominent Democrats are involved in a child pornography ring, located in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant. Where does Jones get his information? Some of it he just makes up. He also gathers stories from sources like RT, a Russian state-sponsored propaganda broadcast.

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.

SHOUTING FIRE

We have freedom of speech in this country, but there are limitations on that freedom. As Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., said, we are not free to “shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Spreading misinformation is another way to cause harm. Foreign countries, who do not have our best interests at heart, spread misinformation through the social media. Russia, Iran, and North Korea post false stories on Facebook and other media. Their purpose is to create discord, influence our elections, and weaken the country. If people base their voting choices on untruths, the outcome can be a disaster, as it was in the 2016 election.

People have died when decisions were made based on bogus facts. In 1998 an English doctor, Andrew Wakefield, published an article in Lancet, a medical journal. The article stated that the MMR vaccine could cause autism in children. Wakefield had a huge conflict of interest in the issue. He had been highly paid by a law group to find that the vaccine had harmed children. Further, he had faked some of the data in his study. Lancet retracted the article when they discovered the truth. Wakefield also lost his license to practice medicine. Yet to this day some people refused to be vaccinated or allow their children to be vaccinated. MMR protects against measles, mumps, and rubella. People who get any of these diseases can die from them. But no one has died or become autistic from the shot.

Another area where misrepresentation has caused death is information about COVID 19. Unfortunately, many of the lies about the virus come from the President himself. Nearly a quarter of a million Americans have died from the virus. If the country had followed common sense, science-based guidelines, according to some estimates 100,000 fewer would have succumbed to the dread illness. In October 2020 The Guardian said that Facebook was the greatest source of disinformation about Covid-19.

Still another way that social media damages people is the psychological harm to people affected by postings. I know how painful it is to lose a child at any age, but I can’t imagine how terrible it must have been for parents of children killed by a madman at Sandy Hook. But then, to see it called a hoax on Facebook is beyond cruelty. Facebook later closed the accounts of people who posted the terrible lie about Sandy Hook, but for the parents who lost children, the damage had already been done.

Misinformation on social media is unacceptable. It creates harm, and it must be stopped. Facebook has finally stopped postings by holocaust deniers. It also finally decided to stop posts of misinformation about Covid-19. They have the ability to stop these posts of bogus information. They cannot be allowed to permit posts of other harmful lies.

Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act protects the social media from liability for any posts on their sites. That means that anyone can post any kind of harmful information on Facebook, and people harmed by the information cannot sue Facebook. This protection has been abused, and it must be taken away. If the social media were liable for any posts they publish, they would be more careful about what they allow. Revoking Section 203 would make the world a safer place.

The Damage Done by Facebook

It is the nature of politicians to lie, and not only Republicans. (I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinski.) But when the President of the United States makes over 20,000 false statements in three and a half years in office, mendacity is brought to a new low. Unfortunately, in these dishonest times the Great Prevaricator has had lots of help. The social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have helped him spread his misinformation across the country. The President communicates more through the social media than through official channels, and for the most part these media leave his misinformation untouched. Donald Trump is not the only one who disseminates fabrications through Facebook and others. It is known, for example, that Russia spread lies through these sources to influence the 2016 Presidential election. Facebook was charged with allowing Russians to sow chaos during that election. Since the election was so close, it is very likely that Russian posts on Facebook contributed to the outcome. Other unfriendly powers, like Iran and North Korea, have also spread untruthful statements through Facebook. It is not just foreign powers who spread fraudulent ideas through the internet. Notably QAnon has been posting poisonous ideas for the past three years. QAnon is anonymous, but it poses as an unnamed high-ranking government official. It promotes the conspiracy theory that Democrats are running a pedophile ring, and Donald Trump is leading the fight against the ring. During the 2016 presidential campaign it was charged that Hillary Clinton was involved in such a ring that was located in the basement of a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong. One man believed the falsehood so strongly that he went to the restaurant armed with a rifle. It turned out that there was no ring, and the restaurant didn’t even have a basement. Marjory Taylor Greene from Georgia seems sure to be elected to Congress. She supports the QAnon conspiracy theories. She also said that Barack Obama is a Muslim, liberal philanthropist George Soros is a Nazi, and she questioned whether a plane really crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. QAnon undermines trust in public institutions through hate speech and the spread of unfound conspiracy theories. Turning Point USA is another group that has been disseminating fraudulent stories. It published pro-Trump comments and misinformation. One of its affiliates, Turning Point Action, was paying teenagers to post messages. Another affiliate, Rally Forge, paid users to cast doubt on mail-in ballots and spread misinformation about the coronavirus. Many of their accounts used stock photos to create false profiles. In April 2020 websites spreading untruthful stories about health on Facebook drew nearly one half a billion views. The top ten sites peddling inaccurate information and conspiracy theories drew nearly four times as many views as the top reputable sites for health information on Facebook. The false claim that pure alcohol could cure the virus led to 800 deaths and 60 cases of blindness after believers drank methanol as a cure. False information and conspiracy theories downplay the public health crisis, spread disinformation about potential remedies and likely safety risks of future vaccines. The social media have taken some steps toward correcting some of the problems created fabrications on their sites. Twitter, for example, has rules against harassment, hate speech, and incitement to violence. They eliminated many accounts that violated these rules. Facebook removed hundreds of fake profiles linked to Turning Point USA. Twitter suspended over one hundred Iranian accounts linked to issues of social justice. When Donald Trump posted a false message that the flu is more deadly than COVID19, Facebook removed the post. Twitter left it in but added a warning label of misinformation. They also prevented it from being shared. Facebook and Google will block all political ads until after the election. We’re glad that the social media is taking some steps to limit deceitful posts on their sites, but what they are doing is not enough. While Facebook and Twitter have removed or labelled some posts as misinformation, lot of disinformation slips through Facebook’s disinformation system. They have stopped publishing posts from QAnon and its affiliates, but individuals can still post QAnon ideas and fabrications. 93,000 active Twitter accounts refer to QAnon in their profile. Since so many people rely on the internet for information, it is unacceptable that so much of the data in cyberspace is fraudulent. Something must be done to correct this. It is not an easy task. Liberals complain that the cloud contains so much prevarication. Conservatives charge that the social media has a liberal bias because so many of the posts that are removed have been placed by conservatives. In a future post we will look at some of the things that can be done to make the social media more honest.b

HOW TO SPOT FAKE NEWS

The internet is swimming in fake news. It is easy to be taken in by information that seems true but is far from it. Some of it is created by deluded people who see conspiracies everywhere. A lot of it is shaped by dishonest people who want to influence their readers. Several foreign countries try to influence events in the United States, such as elections. We need to be careful not to play their games. Some web sites want to get readers to click onto them because they get paid for every click. Readers are more likely to click onto sensational “news,” so it is profitable to report astonishing “information.” Some fake news was never intended to be believed. It is satire. Some readers lack the sense of humor to recognize the satire and take it seriously.

Readers who are looking for conspiracy theories find them in the web sites they follow and repeat them on social media. Since conspiracy seekers read each other’s social media, they create an echo chamber that carry the same stories. Mind Tools offered Six Ways to Spot Fake News.

1.Develop a critical mindset There are people out there who conspire to get us to believe stuff that isn’t so. Be suspicious. If it sounds extreme, check it out. Don’t believe everything you read.

2. Check the sources Really check them. ABCNewscom.co is not what it appears. ABCNews.com is a real news source. ABCNewcom.co is able to copy the logo of the real news site but it publishes fake news. If you aren’t familiar with the author, check him or her out. You might find that the author of sensational news does not have a very good reputation.

3. See who else is reporting the story Can you find the story in any mainstream media? Some people have attacked what Sarah Palin called the “lamestream media.” But the media have editorial standards and trained reporters. Most professional news sources have bias, and they all make mistakes once in a while, but professional publications are not going to publish outright lies or stories that they haven’t checked for accuracy. A year or so ago I saw a report of a celebrity’s death on the Facebook newsfeed. When I went to check it on other sources, I couldn’t find other reference because it was fake news. Don’t believe stuff that is reported only on the social media.

4. Examine the evidence Does the story offer facts to back itself up? Don’t be too quick to believe it if it offers no facts. If it offers facts, check them out.

5. Don’t take images at face value Don’t believe everything you see. With modern technology those who spread false information can put people into a photograph or take them out. The doctored photo may look genuine, but the picture it presents never happened. 6. Check that it sounds right

If the news sounds unbelievable, it may be because it isn’t true. Check the story on a reliable fact checker like Snopes. Snopes will examine the facts of the story and let you know if it true, false, partly true, or out of date. I have received false stories that invited me to verify them on Snopes. When I did that, I found that Snopes had labeled them as false. I have also received messages that told me I couldn’t believe what I read on Snopes. Conspiracy theorists hate Snopes because it exposes how they play fast and loose with the truth, but Snopes has no agenda except to check the veracity of information flying around the internet.

If you want to find the truth, get your information from reliable sources, mainstream media. Use Facebook if you want, to keep in touch with your friends and family, but don’t use it as a source of information about what’s going on in the world.

Making Decisions

Theories are a part of life. They are a way of dealing with things we don’t understand and making decisions about circumstances we meet. Ideally our theories evolve as we learn more about a mystery we are trying to comprehend. Misused, however, theories can become a hindrance to understanding, and decisions based on faulty theories will not lead to useful conclusions.

Conspiracy theories are invalid if they cannot be proven with historical or scientific evidence. They are typically highly improbable. Finding conspiracies where none exist is a mental illness which psychologists call illusory pattern perception.

Some conspiracy theories are not theories at all. They are deliberate lies told to influence the gullible. Many of the statements that come out of the Trump administration are examples of this. In our next posting we will tell how to guard against invalid conspiracy theories and lies posting as theories.

These theories are typically about secret government plans or plots to take control of the world or the government. They often accuse some group of plotting to take over the country. Jews, Catholics, the Illuminati, George Soros, liberals have all been accused of such plots. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book written over a hundred years ago, accuses the Jews of a plot to take control of the world. Although the book has long since been shown to be a forgery, the accusation keeps popping up. Sometimes it is a conspiracy of world bankers (shorthand for Jews) who are involved in the plot. George Soros, a Jew, has been accused of handing out one hundred dollars to rioters (protesters) for causing trouble.

Some have claimed that the moon shot never happened. It was done in Hollywood, and the American government has been fooling people ever since. Not only did the American government fake the moon shot, according to some. It also was somehow complicit in the attacks in September 11, 2001.

What kind of mind comes up with ideas like these, and how gullible must people be to accept such things as true? All of these conspiracies are harmful to someone. The charge that global warming is a liberal hoax has been harmful to everyone. In February 2015 Senator Inhofe brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate, thereby proving (in his mind) that global warming was a hoax. At about the same time a conservative whom I knew smirked on a cold winter day as he asked, “Has anyone heard anything about global warming lately?” Another conservative I knew conceded that the world was getting warmer. “But we don’t know,” he insisted, “if it was caused by man.” On the surface that seems to be a reasonable position. After all, we know that the earth has gone through and recovered from several Ice Ages. That was before human beings existed in the large numbers they do now or had the power to make such a drastic impact on the environment.

However, there is ample evidence that global warming, or climate change, if you prefer, is caused by human activities. People release 35 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, largely by burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. That means it traps heat from escaping earth’s atmosphere, and that is what makes the earth become warmer each year.

Under the Obama administration major steps were taken toward cutting back on greenhouse gases. One major accomplishment was the Paris Accords, which was signed by 194 countries. The signers agreed to cut emissions in their countries.

In the United States these cutbacks were achieved by improving fuel economy in automobiles and using more renewable energy. From 2008 to 2015 carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell 9.5 percent. Another way emissions were cut was by switching from coal to natural gas for power plants. Gas is much cleaner than coal and releases less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. During the Obama administration natural gas production rose 28 percent in the United States.

One of the first things Donald Trump did in his misrule was to withdraw the country from the Paris Accords. He lifted the restrictions on fuel economy in American cars. He promoted what he called “beautiful, clean coal,” a meaningless phrase. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt had worked as a lawyer for energy companies in the past. He finally resigned in 2018 under charges of questionable ethics. Before he resigned, he pulled the teeth from many of the environmental-friendly policies that had been put in place during the Obama administration.

Conservatives still question whether climate change is real, but its evidence is all around us, and it gets more frightening every day. As I write, an area of 780 square miles in California has burned. That’s half the size of Rhode Island. The fires have been getting larger every year. That’s because climate change has brought warmer, dryer conditions to the forests. Other parts of the world are experiencing the same phenomena. Indonesia, Brazil, and Australia have all face devasting fires in recent years. One study estimated that climate change makes these fires 30 percent more likely.

Forest fires are not the only natural phenomenon gone awry. Each year we are hit with more strong hurricanes. That is because the conditions for the storms increase over warmer ocean waters. It is ironic that some people think measures intended to decrease greenhouse gases put an unnecessary burden on business. However, the reverse is true. Procedures to cut emissions create new business opportunities, and they cost much less than the damage done by fires and hurricanes.

Another conspiracy theory that has created havoc in the United States is the charge that the coronavirus is a hoax. Forcing people to wear masks in public places is a violation of their freedom. Anyway, the virus is not as deadly as it seems. It is hardly more dangerous than the flu, and it will disappear by itself anyway. Not only that, but vaccines for the virus will inject people with something that will allow them to be tracked.

Unfortunately this view of the virus did not come from someone’s sick speculation. It came from an outright lie. By the President of the United States! This was revealed in Bob Woodward’s book, where the President told Woodward that he understood how dangerous the coronavirus was, but he didn’t want to alarm people! This was in Woodward’s book. Tapes of the Trump’s words were played on television, so there could be no doubt about them. It is hard to understand why anyone would believe anything he says. By the summer of 2020, fact checkers at The Washington Post determined that Trump had told 20,000 lies since the beginning of his term. Because of the President’s failure to reveal the truth about the virus’s danger and his urging businesses and schools to reopen before they had dealt with the pandemic, businesses have failed and almost 200,000 Americans have died.

It is time for us to learn the truth and reject false conspiracy theories.

MORE CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The conspiracy theories that one hears about seem to be pretty much ideas believed by conservatives. I wondered if my liberal bias prevented from seeing liberal conspiracy concepts for what they are, crackpot ideas. Then I began reading the assertion that both political viewpoints have their own thoughts of secret intrigue.

One writer who offered this idea was Josh Hart, a psychology professor at Union College. Hart gave the idea that climate change is a hoax as an example of a conservative theory. For the liberals, Hart said the thought that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in 2016 is a conspiracy theory. As I pointed out in my September 4 post, these two theories are not equivalent.

Let’s compare a few other conspiracy theories. First some conservative examples: The shootings of elementary students at Sandy Hook is a hoax. The Moon Landing is another staged hoax. The American government was somehow complicit in airplane crashes in September 9/11. Prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, were involved in some kind of child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant. The one that liberals are more likely to follow is that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel.

The conservative conspiracy stories are ludicrous. There is zero evidence to support any of them. On the contrary, major news sources have published evidence things did not happen the way theorists portray them. A sick young man did shoot elementary students at Sandy Hook. Astronauts did land on the moon. A group of Moslem extremists piloted hijacked planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon. The American government had no prior knowledge of the plot. Not only was the story about Democrats being involved in a sex ring false, the restaurant where this supposedly took place didn’t even have a basement. Sarah Palin referred to the mainstream media as the “lamestream” media because it did not publish the conspiracy stories without evidence.

The pee story might or might not be true. It came from a group hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump. The campaign hired Fusion GPS to look into Trump’s ties to Russia. Fusion GPS in turn hired Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence agent. Evidently Steele heard stories about Trump hiring prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel. The reason he wanted that done is that the bed had once been occupied by Barack and Michelle Obama.

We don’t know if the story is true. If it is true, it is not a nice thing to do, but it pales beside Trump’s many disgraceful acts. There is another difference between the conservative conspiracy theories and liberal theories. That is the strength of the belief. Conservatives are strongly convinced that climate change is a liberal hoax. The Trump administration has eased many of the restrictions put in place by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas. Conservatives are much more likely to consider the coronavirus a hoax and consider rules to wear a mask a violation of their civil rights. They march and demonstrate to protests the tyranny of having to wear a mask.

Liberals are not likely to care about the Trump pee story. If it is true, it does not make that much difference, because much worse things about Donald Trump are already well known.

Finally we come to the conclusion that conspiracy theories are in fact a right-wing phenomenon. Here is what the authors of The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking have to say:

“It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States em-brace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophi-cal, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in Amer-ican Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults we investigated the relation-ship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspira-torial thinking in general.

“Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general. Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to en-gage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals. The relationship between ideology and con-spiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.

“Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to under-mine and destroy a way of life.” (Richard Hofstadter, 1964, p. 29)

WHO ARE THE BELIEVERS?

The world is full of problems. As soon as one situation is cleared up, another one or three arise. One way to deal with life’s difficulties is to ascribe them to some sort of a conspiracy. Since most conspiracies are not backed by accurate information, using these theories to explain situations, rather than solving problems, usually create new ones.

Conspiracy theories fly at us every day. Some people latch onto these “explanations” of everything, while others see right away that these stories too ridiculous to believe. What makes some people accept these tales while others reject them out of hand? Psychological studies have shown that people who are open to accepting conspiracy theories have some things in common.

Conspiracy followers often have a need to feel unique. They’re likely to be narcissistic, feel alienated and socially isolated. They may feel powerless in relation to the problems they see in the world. Believers may feel that American values are eroding. They look for a scapegoat to blame for the problems. Theorists are suspicious, sometimes to the point of paranoia. They tend to see the world as a dangerous place.

The big problem of the present time is the coronavirus and its effects. Some people find it difficult to deal with the facts of the issue. If they adopt one of the conspiracy theories relating to it, they feel they have some power over it. If government agencies like the CDC are not telling the truth about the virus, the theory makes the virus seem less threatening to them. According to the CDC, over 180,000 Americans have died of the virus. Suppose most of those people died of something else. What if only six percent of those deaths were actually from the virus, and the rest died from other causes. That makes the virus seem less powerful. People who follow that theory can also get a sense of superiority since they know the “real” facts, and they are not taken in like the sheep who believe what they read in the newspapers and see on television news.

Why would the CDC lie about the numbers? Theorists just ignore questions like that, but they tend to disbelieve any authorities, so the CDC might have its own reasons for exaggerating the number of deaths from the virus. Maybe they need to scare people to get the funding they want from Congress.

The truth of the 6 percent story is actually a misreading of a CDC report. The report stated that 94 percent if those who died from the coronavirus had some other health condition. That is why the virus is especially dangerous to older people. Most older people already have some kind of health problems like disease of the heart or lungs. Once people with a health issue came down with the virus, it was likely to exacerbate the existing problem and cause their death. In other words, they would not have died if they had not contracted the virus.

Bill Gates has donated money to research on vaccines to counter the virus. Theorists tend to be skeptical about that too. To them, vaccines are questionable anyway. Further Gates might make a lot of money from the sale of the vaccine. And while they’re at it, theorists promote the idea that vaccines promoted by Gates might contain microchips that will allow “the authorities” to trace the movements of anyone who gets the vaccine.

Josh Hart, a psychology professor at Union College, stated that both Republicans and Democrats followed certain conspiracy theories. Republicans were more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, whereas Democrats were more apt to be drawn toward the theory that that in the 2016 presidential campaign the Trump team colluded with the Russians.

Perhaps Hart’s examples were an attempt to be fair and see similarities in the mindset of both parties. But a quick look at the examples shows that the events are not equivalent at all. For decades scientists have known that greenhouse gases are creating a climate change. The physical evidence of the change is here for everyone to see: the melting icebergs and the increasingly hotter summers. To deny climate change is to deny obvious facts.

The Trump campaign’s collusions with the Russians is hardly a theory at all. The Mueller report detailed accounts of Russian help to the Trump campaign. More recently the Republican-controlled Senate released an account of even more

collusion between the campaign and the Russians. One of campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s contacts was a Russian intelligence officer. As we look at the existing conspiracy theories, we see that they belong mostly to conservatives. We will explore this further in a later post.