Why conspiracy theories have gone viral in the time of coronavirus
COVID is a hoax, Bill Gates is enacting a “global microchipping” plan, Prince Charles is a vampire.... what is it with conspiracy theories lately?
The coronavirus is a genetically engineered bioweapon made by the Chinese. Or possibly the Americans. It originated in a lab in Wuhan. Or possibly a US military lab. No, actually it’s a hoax. But even though it’s a hoax, it’s also caused by 5G masts broadcasting electromagnetic waves. It is part of a scheme devised by Bill Gates to introduce mass global vaccination as a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government. Dr Anthony Fauci – the mild-mannered director of America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a prominent member of the White House’s coronavirus task force before being sidelined by Donald Trump – is in on it. And so is the World Health Organisation. Believe all that, and you’ll believe anything.
But a lot of people, it seems, do. Conspiracy theories flourish in times of paranoia, uncertainty and fear – and the coronavirus pandemic presents all three. It has arrived out of the blue, driving whole nations into a state of paralysis, laying waste to the global economy, and carrying with it a panoply of dystopian threats and fears – the curtailing of civil liberties, involuntary quarantine and restrictions on movement. There is disagreement about exactly what the virus is, how it originated and how best to deal with it – affirming screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim that “nobody knows anything”. If ever there was a time when certainty was needed, it is now.
But this, it seems, is also a moment when trust in institutions, government and the media is at a dangerous low – opening the door wide for conspiracy theories and their seductive promise of an apparent map to the unmappable; a hidden “truth”, or a pacifying lie. A recent study by researchers at Oxford University into conspiracy theories shows how ideas that would otherwise have been confined to the fringes have become mainstream, reflecting a distrust in official accounts. And which may, in turn, discourage people from following official health guidelines.
Fourteen per cent of those surveyed in England agreed “moderately” or “completely” that the coronavirus is a hoax, 38 per cent that it’s man-made, 26 per cent that it’s a deliberate attempt to “reduce the size of the global population”. Thirty-nine per cent thought that the British Government is misleading the public about the cause of the virus, and 44 per cent were prepared to believe the “mainstream media” is “deliberately feeding us misinformation about the virus and lockdown”. The study was led by Daniel Freeman, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry, whose principal area of research is paranoia and mistrust. Freeman says he was “surprised and concerned” by the findings. “These are beliefs that are false and wrong. Belief affects action, and in this case may well affect how people are adhering to guidelines, and future uptake of vaccines and other interventions.”
Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent, and an authority on conspiracy theories, says that such ideas appeal to people when they experience feelings of uncertainty, powerlessness and anxiety. “People are looking for explanations for the crisis, and they are sometimes looking for someone to blame,” she says. “People’s psychological needs for certainty and security are likely to be very frustrated – and conspiracy theories might appear to offer some kind of solace.”
Covid brings together a particularly inflammable assortment of fears about technology, medicine, information and power. Take 5G. Claims about the link between the introduction of 5G technology and Covid first appeared on social media in late January. One theory is that 5G suppresses the immune system, making people more susceptible to the virus. Another holds that the virus is actually a form of radiation poisoning transmitted through radio waves (a theory that 21 per cent of respondents to the Oxford University survey were prepared, to some degree, to entertain). Both have been roundly dismissed by scientists and doctors as the worst kind of fake news.
Central to most conspiracy theories is the invisible presence of a powerful, secretive, often occult cabal bent on global domination. It is the hidden “they”, and its cast of characters changes over the years. But foremost among them is the Illuminati – the secret society founded in 1776 in Bavaria by law professor Adam Weishaupt. Despite it being stamped out in the 1780s, conspiracy theorists have continued to hold the Illuminati accountable for everything from the French Revolution to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Present members allegedly include Prince Philip, the Pope and Beyoncé. Over the years other targets have emerged: the Rockefellers, the Bilderberg Group, the financier George Soros and the Rothschilds. No conspiracy theory can get very far without demonising those who have been the victims of such ideas for centuries: the Jews. (Around one-fifth of those questioned in the Oxford survey were prepared to endorse to some degree the proposition that “Jews have created the virus to collapse the economy for financial gain”.)
But the virus has also brought new actors onto the stage, most notably Bill Gates. Gates is the world’s second wealthiest man – and one of its most generous benefactors. As of 2018, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had an endowment of $46.8 billion, making it one of the world’s largest private charitable organisations. In April, Gates announced that the Foundation, which has hitherto focused on HIV and the eradication of polio and malaria, would now be turning its “total attention” on the coronavirus.
Gates’s commitment to mass vaccination programs has long been the subject of conspiracy theories. In 2011 he credited vaccines with reducing population growth – spawning theories that he had inadvertently “admitted” he was using vaccines to kill or sterilise people in developing countries. What Gates was actually saying was that evidence shows that by reducing child mortality rates through vaccination programs, families would be more prepared to practise birth control. But the pandemic has brought another twist – this time alleging that Gates has actually been involved in developing and spreading the virus in order to introduce a mass vaccination program that will be used to introduce total surveillance and enslavement by “global microchipping”.
This theory has proved particularly seductive to some fundamentalist Christians in America, who see it as proof of prophecy in the Book of Revelation. Gates as “the anti-Christ” has since become a popular meme in the murkier depths of social media. These theories are not confined to the fringes, either. In May, Italian MP Sara Cunial made a speech in her country’s parliament claiming that Gates’ “real reason” for developing a vaccine for COVID-19 was “absolute domination” of the world’s population, and called for him to be tried for crimes against humanity. A video of Cunial’s speech shared on social media went on to be viewed more than one million times. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggested that an astonishing 44 per cent of Republican voters in the US believe the conspiracy theories about Gates.
Understandably perhaps, Gates has not commented on the theories but Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, has expressed concern about the proliferation of conspiracy theories online and the damage this could cause to public health, saying: “At a time like this, when the world is facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis, it’s distressing that there are people spreading misinformation when we should all be looking for ways to collaborate and save lives. Right now, one of the best things we can do to stop the spread of COVID-19 is spread the facts.”
The phrase “rabbit hole” is often used in the context of conspiracy theories – and rightly so. Once you enter, it’s easy to lose yourself in a labyrinth of paranoia, delusion and pseudoscience. The virus has brought to the fore a cast of conspiratorial voices, including clinicians such as Rashid Buttar and Judy Mikovits. Mikovits has become something of a heroic figure among conspiracy theorists, depicted as a whistleblower who courageously speaks truth to power. Her rise to fame provides a fascinating case study of how theories peddling misinformation about the coronavirus are spread – and exactly who spreads them.
Mikovits was research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute, a private research centre in Nevada, when in 2009 she co-authored a paper in the journal Science that reported that an obscure retrovirus, XMRV, found in mice, was the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. Subsequent research showed that she was wrong and the paper was retracted. Mikovits recently published a book, Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science, promoted as “a behind the scenes look at the issues and egos which will determine the future health of humanity”. She is also the subject of a forthcoming documentary called Plandemic; at the beginning of May, a 26-minute trailer was released on YouTube and quickly went viral. In the video, a softly spoken Mikovits claims that COVID-19 originated between the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and a lab in Wuhan, and asserts the familiar theory that a “circular cabal” is using it as a cover to profiteer and entrench its power. The virus, she claims, is nothing more than “a severe cough”, and wearing face masks will actually help “activate” the virus and reinfect the wearer over and over. Mikovits’ claims have been comprehensively debunked by clinicians and by Science magazine. (She did not respond to requests for an interview.) Nevertheless, her book went to number one on Amazon’s print bestseller list and number two on The New York Times list. American social media researcher Erin Gallagher has charted how the Plandemic video spread largely thanks to what she describes as “a massive cascade” of postings and shares on social media by conspiracy theory and far-right Facebook groups with huge memberships.
On Twitter, the spread of coronavirus conspiracy theories resembles a co-ordinated astroturfing campaign with networks of accounts repeatedly and quickly retweeting identical content, according to the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology. It says the vast majority of co-ordinated accounts spreading the “Chinese bioweapon” theory identify as Pro-Trump, QAnon and/or Republican partisan. QAnon is an anonymous individual, or more likely group, best known for perpetrating fevered theories on the 4chan social media site – known for its alt-right user base – about a “deep state” plot against Donald Trump. Last year the FBI singled out QAnon in a document identifying “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” as a potential terrorist threat.
Public Facebook groups that have also pushed Plandemic include “Drain The Swamp” and “Chemtrails Global Skywatch”, a site with 181,000 members that pushes the longstanding conspiracy theory that lingering condensation trails from aircraft actually consist of biological or chemical agents sprayed for a variety of sinister purposes. Plandemic was removed from YouTube for contravening its prohibition on “content that includes medically unsubstantiated diagnostic advice for COVID-19”. It was also removed from Facebook, Vimeo and Twitter. But Mikovits and other prominent anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists have found a welcome on independent channels.
For psychiatry professor Daniel Freeman, the general erosion of trust in experts must be halted, “because this is exactly the moment we need to rely on them”. But the insidiousness of conspiracy theories goes deeper still. There is some irony in the fact that theories which purport to tell the truth about hidden organisations plotting to rule the world by fear actually cultivate precisely that fear and paranoia themselves – the belief that everything we are told is designed to deceive and enslave us, that the world as we know it is a lie and fundamentally evil. There can be no more harmful conspiracy theory than that.
FIVE OF THE WEIRDEST CONSPIRACY THEORIES
1. Actors were used in the video of George Floyd’s death
The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked unrest around the world, with more than 50 countries participating in the Black Lives Matter protests. And with it has come a wealth of conspiracy theories, the main one being that everyone involved, including Floyd himself, are actors. Specifically, it’s what is dubbed a “false flag” conspiracy, when an incident is staged by a group that wants a reason to “retaliate” against an enemy it will later accuse of the attack.
2. Pokemon Go is a government spying program
As soon as the hugely popular gaming app was launched in 2016, an avalanche of theories followed. The one that stuck was the claim that the game was a surveillance tool for the CIA (users had to provide personal information including access to their Google accounts). The discovery that the game’s developer, Niantic, was headed up by a man called John Hanke only added fuel to this theory’s fire. Hanke started Keyhole, Inc – whose mapping platform eventually became Google Earth with help from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.
3. Prince Charles is a vampire
According to genealogy records, Prince Charles is related to Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century Romanian warlord and the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This has given rise to theorists claiming Charles shares more with his ancestor than a mere bloodline. The theory was bolstered by the claim that porphyria, a condition that makes the skin particularly sensitive to sunlight, runs in the Royal family.
4. Joan Rivers was murdered for joking about the Obamas
When comedian Joan Rivers died in 2014 at the age of 81, conspiracy theorists alleged that her death during routine surgery had been ordered by the Obamas in retaliation for a comment she’d made about the former president and first lady (Rivers had joked to a photographer that she believed Michelle was transgender and Obama was gay). Alex Jones, host of the far-right website InfoWars and a regular peddler of off-the-wall conspiracy theories, said as a result of her comments Joan was “deader than a doornail”.
5. Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile ring out of a pizza shop
The claim that Hillary Clinton was running a child-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong first appeared on the internet messaging board 4chan. The story originated when users spotted recurring uses of the word “pizza” in her hacked emails (“c.p.” meaning cheese pizza is sometimes used on paedophile chatrooms to denote explicit images of children). So potent were the bogus claims that in December 2016 a gunman entered the pizzeria and fired shots. The restaurant turned out not to even have a basement.
The Telegraph