The Guardian.kalm wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 8:00 amThis might help you.SeattleGriz wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 7:21 am
Noted. You're upset your propaganda is being shut down too.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... us-beliefsNaomi Klein examines the mushrooming of conspiracism in her new book Doppelganger, noting that people often come under its sway because they are searching for a practical solution to a sense of unfairness. Conspiracists have a “fantasy of justice”, hoping that the evil-doing elites can be arrested and stopped. “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right,” she writes. “The feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit … the feeling that important truths are being hidden.” She quotes digital journalism scholar Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s conclusion that: “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”
Lee’s appetite for conspiracies started to wane when the “alt-right” US broadcaster Alex Jones began claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that no one died and the parents of the 20 children who died were “crisis actors” – hired to play disaster victims. Lee found this implausible and felt irritated by other wild theories swirling around the internet – that Justin Bieber and Eminem were Illuminati clones, that a paedophile ring, involving people at the highest level of the Democratic party, was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant. “I looked at Pizzagate and thought, ‘Well that’s just stupid.’” (He spends six podcast episodes debunking the Pizzagate conspiracy; this seems a pithier summary.)
When Covid triggered a popularity surge for conspiracy theorists, Lee was already done with it, and simply noted that if there really was a global movement working to establish a new world order through the pandemic, they were going about it in a strikingly ill-coordinated and muddled manner. “The governments weren’t acting in lockstep with each other. There was no well-oiled machine; it was disorganised. No one was in charge.”
He understands why other people were attracted to the idea: “Just like 9/11 brought people into conspiracies, Covid was another moment when people were scared and wanted answers, and they found conspiracy influencers saying: ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not real.’”
Lee was an early adopter of ideas that have surged in popularity as people spend more time online, and as trust in the mainstream media falters with the suggestion (much propagated by the former US president Donald Trump) that they are spreaders of fake news. The emergence of QAnon (which propagates the baseless theory that Trump was battling a cabal of sex-trafficking satanists, some of whom were Democrats) has attracted more people to this world. Lee’s interests preceded the arrival of powerful opinion-shaping algorithms pushing people into closed loops of fact-free narratives. Since leaving the fold he has developed a sharp clarity about the self-interested financial motivations of conspiracists who work to monetise their online presence with increasingly wild, clickbaity dispatches.
We’re no longer talking about minor fringe movements – radicalisation is spreading through a complex system of beliefs “It’s a big problem that’s getting much worse. People are being manipulated with misinformation,” he says. He was disturbed by the death in 2021 of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by a police officer during the 6 January riots inside the US Capitol. Her Twitter feed was full of references to QAnon conspiracies. “That could have been me or my partner,” he says of Babbitt. “She believed what we believed. That’s what made me think I should speak out, tell my story to help bring other conspiracists out, so they don’t become the next Ashli.”
Talk about foil hat blueanon. I post facts and you post feelz.
Are there people out there susceptible to every conspiracy that agrees with their own bias? 
