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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

People try to “debunk” conspiracy theories rationally, when really it’s the emotional content that matters.

It’s like talking to someone believing their cheating spouse did X, Y, Z crazy thing. If you responded to that person trying to debunk X, Y, and Z rationally you’d just anger them further. What matters is really the underlying anger that they’re feeling. Not litigating actual facts. In fact such litigating can feel like an attack or invalidation of the underlying emotion.

Same is true with feeling threatened by the appearance of “gracias” signs at a restaurant. Or a blue collar person losing status in an increasingly knowledge economy.

I feel like to make progress as a society we have to speak to the underlying “emotional truth” and not come across as pedants over facts.

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Social media is what is making people anxious in the first place. Then they serve as the platform for the circular referencing "proof". Facebook & WhatsApp posts are supported by YouTube videos, are supported by tweets, are supported by more YouTube videos and then back to more Facebook.

So some people I was visiting in a small town started going on about 'chemtrails' they learned about from someone on Facebook. These contrails control the weather, while dispensing chemicals that get into the ground water to control people's minds. They showed me a video on YouTube, it was polished bullshit if I ever saw it. Then there were more FB posts about people who "know the truth".

It was hopeless, even with apps that showed the flight origin and destination of of the planes overhead for commercial cargo, passengers, etc. Apparently hundreds of international and domestic flights are all part of a conspiracy to make it cloudy and dispense chemicals to control the minds of this town. Further, the chemicals are clearly not working since they are even be able to have these thoughts.

I blame social media. The real disaster is coming, this is just the second inning.

Social media as we know it is just further exposing the rot at the core of our thinking. Before the rise of Twitter and Facebook you had shock jockeys rule the radio world spreading conspiracy theories and what not. Social media has amplified those effects by allowing them to fester and indeed among many far right media sources you see them gleefully engage in such rhetoric as well (see: Seth Rich).

Social media is part of the greater symptom which is that conspiratorial thinking has gained mass appeal.

Those shock jockeys didn’t use your browsing history to determine exactly which conspiracies you will be most susceptible to. Denying the responsibility of YouTube, Facebook and other platforms that pursue viewer engagement at any cost by calling them a “symptom” of society is disingenuous and almost ill intended.

“Hey the cancer that put you in bed is just a symptom of who you are.”

Those shock jockeys engaged their viewers through taking calls, reaching out or otherwise. I'm not denying the responsibility of social media sites by abusing their algorithmic bullshit, but the fact of the matter is that the modern conspiracy theorist originated with the radio. That's where Alex Jones got his start among many others.

If you don't know the history of how these things started, then all you'll do by removing Youtube, Facebook et al is treat one part of the cancer when it's metastasized to the rest of your body. It's ignorant. Sites like Infowars or Breitbart will rise from their ashes and we will have solved nothing.

Of course there are actors that downright pursue infecting the minds of people. However, the problem did not get out of control until the content platforms found those who were more susceptible to their message “at scale”.

Maybe it's semantics, but you're giving to much credit to recommendations. There's no intent that specific; all they really do is see that you liked X, and most people who liked X like Y, so it shows you Y. Politically, it causes echo chambers, it can show people all sorts of conspiracy theories, but my Youtube recommendations right now are showing me rollercoasters, airplanes, magic tricks, and cooking.

I understand that it is just sophisticated look alike targeting. Also, I don’t mean to say that the original intent of the designers is evil. However, the effects on viewers have to be analyzed, and most likely some changes are needed to stop people from falling into these echo chambers.

People blame FB for social media woes, but I feel that FB is different from the other social networks in that it’s the world you fully curate and manage. If FB is giving you grief, that’s people on your green list giving you grief. If you need FB to come in to manage that, then you’re basically saying you can’t even handle the agency involved in freedom of association.

I don’t have a Facebook account, and the company causes me grief regularly.

> Social media is what is making people anxious in the first place.

What you're saying is ignorance is bliss. Without social media, a few phone calls to media houses would have been sufficient to squelch the recent murder of a black male by the police.

The medium is not at fault.

We all hailed Facebook helped organize 'successful' revolutions in some 'oppressive' states.

It's easier to believe tales about people I distrust.

I prefer we focused on ways to increase transparency and fairness in government. That's the conspiracy theory vaccine we need.

No, what I am saying is that social media is actually causing mental health issues including anxiety. If anxiety us at the root of people falling for conspiracies, then consider social media the fertilizer and the field.

I haven't hailed FB for squat. I don't even use it, but FB algorithms have been responsible for one genocide already, and I won't give it credit for the Arab Spring even for the small successes that were achieved.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

The sky seems to have cleared up here in NL and appears more blue, and the sun feels more intense.

I am not the only one who has this impression.

I spend considerable time outside.

It's a good impulse, and almost certainly more productive, but aren't we still left with how to deal with people holding (and especially acting on) totally counterfactual beliefs? I would like them feel heard, but without encouraging them to actually harm other people (which fits with the 'cheating spouse' analogy I'd say).

My experience (I know a lot of people that are into conspiracies) is that if you show people they have insufficient knowledge to make their conclusions it makes them feel uncertain in their belief. They’ll draw back into the certainty of their theory. I’m not sure there is a way to convince conspiracy theorists. People that overcame their false beliefs seem to do this from an internal impetus but I‘d be happy to be proven wrong.

(To be clear I’m talking about 100% crazy theories like flat earth)

Wait, why are people threatened by gracias signs?

I left a volunteer service organization because, among other things, I grew tired of the political slant that included members posting things like “if you don’t like that we speak English in America, feel free to leave”.

Demographics are a huge sore spot for a lot of people.

Because people worry people different then them are coming to the US and taking their jobs. Because people find immigration threatening...

A more empathetic mindset can help everyone here. Try "People who are barely managing to keep living fear systemic changes that might make life as they know it impossible."

Thank you for this. It's incredible how so many people are incapable of empathizing with another person's perspective. People who feel fear of losing their livelihoods in a fast changing society are not all just ignorant racists to be thrown away. If we as a country want to come back from the political brink, we need to start by empathizing rather than demonizing.

Let's not call them incapable. Just not practiced :)

Because dem Mexicans are stealin our jerbs!

Yes, its literally just tribalism gone wild again, your typical lazy fast thinking pooping out nuggets of racism.

This is lazy thinking as well. There are enormous political and economic factors at play.

It’s not only racism that people leverage for political influence. People also use racism as a label for political gain.

But the people on the receiving end of that labelling tend not to be well represented on this forum, so it’s easy to smear them as backwards and ignore their complaints.

If you are part of the undifferentiated labour pool, well, this might actually be happening to you.

Immigration benefits the U.S overall but if you are hourly labour with no special skills then it is probably not helping your wages.

This needs to be more emphasized. It doesn't have to be racism, or rather the root cause is not a hate for another it's extreme anxiety of one's position for good cause. There a lot of people in the US who are not immigrant who are members of the precariat.

I don't feel particularly threatened or anything, but let me put it this way. Living in California and seeing more and more corporate advertising being done in Spanish (sometimes without even any English) leaves me with some concern. The concern is that some day, people(especially low-skill) will not be able to find a job unless they learn Spanish. Knowing Spanish will be a requirement to be able to compete for customer-facing jobs because they have decided that Spanish speakers should not have to learn English in this country, and that we should cater to them in the way of having documents, signs, etc. in Spanish. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, it's a nice thing. But the effect is that, eventually there is no need to learn English. You live in a community where everyone speaks Spanish already, so every business has to cater to Spanish speakers if they want good sales. So my concern goes out to all the people who grow up in this country who have only learned English, and are no longer at the point of being capable or willing to learn Spanish, who can no longer compete with born Spanish speakers or people who learned it from a young age. If that's the result we want, we should have been teaching Spanish from elementary school. But foreign language learning starts in high school, where you are only required to take a foreign language for 2 years, and it doesn't have to be Spanish.

yes, emotional content matters and we should try to be empathetic and compassionate, but the flip side of that is that (a primary marker of) maturation is the development of coping mechanisms to deal with anger and the underlying fear that fuels it, rather than mainly relying on others to kid-glove each other. and it’s both, not one or the other.

What was the term again? “Snowflakes”. Right.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." -Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk Chapter 17.

What's wrong with letting the person that feels threatened by the "graciás" sign go on feeling threatened?

As long as they don't take any aggressive or dangerous actions based on the feeling of course.

Well maybe that’s exactly my point. Feeling threatened maybe feels taboo, so we don’t talk about it. Suppressing it creates the breeding ground for conspiracy theories. Talking about it helps us approach it rationally.

>As long as they don't take any aggressive or dangerous actions based on the feeling of course.

That's exactly what they will eventually do.

But that threatened feeling goes on to inform these people's votes or who they connect with etc. Such emotions are not innocuous and their damage is not confined only to the person who holds them.

Thanks for this insightful post! In this sense conspiracy theories are like a pot boiling over. You ultimately have a mess on your hands to wipe up, but the first thing is to remove the source of heat.

> People try to “debunk” conspiracy theories rationally, when really it’s the emotional content that matters.

I disagree. Often I see some sort of conspiracy theory online and I am interested in seeing in what degree it is true or false. I am interested in rational arguments from both sides, not some emotional bullshit. How do you deduce if a theory is true or not otherwise?

I don’t think anyone has a clue what “emotional truth” looks like for antivaxxers or people who believe coronavirus is caused by 5G towers.

Because of anger with the medical system or “being told what to do”

Because I want an easy scapegoat for my Covid fears and greedy telecom companies are already disliked...

So we can appease them - and prevent them from spreading potentially harmful information - by trying to make them less angry with the medical system or the telecom companies?

Sounds nebulous and I’m highly doubtful.

Designing a healthcare system that makes people less angry would be a fantastic way to make people trust healthcare institutions more.

If that seems unactionable, perhaps it says something about the quality of our healthcare systems.

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