Even If It's 'Bonkers,' Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon, Other Conspiracy Theories | Hacker News Reader

Even If It's 'Bonkers,' Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon, Other Conspiracy Theories

npr.org

33 pointstoomuchtodo82 comments

This is a direct result of the degradation of journalism.

When you notice that mass media has a political agenda, you stop trusting them. You look for information somewhere else. If you are not very educated and don't have time to do serious research, you fall for conspiracy theories, since they are the complete opposite of mass media.

> This is a direct result of the degradation of journalism.

And, you know, a political ideology that believes the media lies about everything. The current President of the United States himself says it constantly.

Yes, Trump says things that are misleading or blatantly untrue. However I don't think mistrust in the MSM is "ideology" associated with one party. Fox News is the MSM for many people and they've given us many reasons to distrust them.

Just off the top of my head:

* WaPo and NYT lied about WMDs and Iraq.

* NYT lied about NSA spying programs in 2005. Snowden explicitly said he gave his leaks to a British organization because US news could not be trusted.

* Rolling Stone misrepresented or omitted testimonies in 'A Rape on Campus'.

* CNN said repeatedly that Clinton was polling higher than Trump and there was absolutely no way he was going to win. CNN also blacked out Yang and Sanders coverage and got flak for it. CNN also retracted at least one story on Trump, i cant remember what it was about but probably Russia.

* HuffPo has retracted a racist article after it was revealed the author had faked their identity, and editors made no attempt to verify whether or not their credentials were real.

* And of course everyone is familiar with the evils of 'new media' companies like Facebook and YouTube, from spreading harmful content to children, unfairly enforcing policies, spreading misinformation, and harmful ads.

I'm sure I could come up with more. Why should I trust them? What have these organizations done to prove to the public they are changing? Why does distrusting them make me some sort of alt-right crazy? It seems like the media has the burden of proof, not me. From where I stand, the "political ideology" is a reaction to a sleazy, corrupt, and dying media industry.

You're cherry-picking a few specific examples on the Democratic side, and comparing it to a party that literally ran - and had elected - a QAnon senator [1].

This whataboutism and false equivalency is extremely toxic.

Are dems perfect? Lord no. Does the MSM make mistakes? Absolutely. Is one side actively engaged in a war on truth? Yeah, kinda.

> However I don't think mistrust in the MSM is "ideology" associated with one party. Fox News is the MSM for many people and they've given us many reasons to distrust them.

I watch an awful lot of Fox, and let me assure you, they positioned themselves very much outside the mainstream media. They railed against the MSM non-stop for 4+ years by name. Unfortunately, they were hoisted by their own petard when they called Arizona for Biden. I was watching it live, and I nearly spat out my whiskey. They got hucked into the MSM bin by Trump supporters and left for dead on November 3, 2020, around 6PM PST.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/us/politics/qanon-candida...

> This whataboutism and false equivalency is extremely toxic.

It's not whataboutism, I never excused Trump nor the Republicans. They should be called out on their bullshit. If anything, responding to a comment solely about things the media has done with Senate election results is whataboutism.

False equivalency... Eh, maybe. The eye-for-an-eye tallying of sins never goes well and I'm not ready to try at the moment. But I will agree that Fox News has its reputation as a cesspool for a reason.

> Are dems perfect? Lord no. Does the MSM make mistakes? Absolutely. Is one side actively engaged in a war on truth? Yeah, kinda.

This helped me realize the problem. You come just short of saying MSM == Democrats, other news == Republicans. Not a single line of my previous post criticized any Dem politicians, only the MSM. The previous post has at least one example of the MSM working against progressive values. They are not the same thing. If you consider them the same thing, I think that's strange, because I don't think they should be. If there's some evidence that they are the same thing, do share, you'll probably be adding CNN's rap sheet of corruption.

> You come just short of saying MSM == Democrats, other news == Republicans.

Not really, that’s using the rights definition of it, not my opinion.

From their perspective, there’s the “MSM” (everyone you’ve ever heard of except...) Fox, Breitbart and Sinclair.

Fox got hucked into the MSM pile, so there’s everyone you’ve ever heard of (“MSM”), Breitbart and Sinclair.

Congress is not helping see:

https://nypost.com/2020/12/29/covid-19-bill-started-a-180-da...

Am I the only one who thinks that this is largely the fault of the social media giants?

Yeah, this feels like the outcome of echo chambers. The whole idea of "repeating a lie often enough makes it true" is happening constantly on a personalized micro scale.

In the past you had one nutter yelling on the street corner about the pedophiles in the pizza shops, and everyone kinda walked on by, thinking man, that guy's nutters. Now he's in your house, 6 hours a day. And eventually, you're like, man, those pizza shops, we've gotta do something about.

I just finished 'When Prophecy Fails' It's a study about what people do when they are presented with info that disproves their crazy ideas. It turns out, that when the end of the world doesn't come, if you're by yourself, and don't have any other true believers around to help you explain away the miss, then you usually become disillusioned and move away from whatever movement you're in.

On the other hand, when true believers are around, the feedback loop helps soften the blow and find an excuse. It blocks out the doubt and you continue in your beliefs.

The really shitty thing here is that with the internet, you never have to go through the disappointment of an obvious failed prophecy alone, you can reach out to 4 chan and explain away and justify and find support and reassurance that you weren't actually wrong, when the evidence right in front of your face is clearly saying you were wrong. This is contributing to a snowball effect where these movements are just connecting and growing and never suffer setbacks when the are obviously wrong. (i.e. pizza gate guy shooting into the closet.)

Sounds like a good read, I'll check it out! Thanks!

In the current incarnation, sure. But the real "problem" is the internet where people with niche ideas can find like-minded people and let their ideas and followers grow from there.

Sometimes the results are benign. Sometimes they aren't.

It is however exacerbated by algorithms designed to feed you content they know you'll react to. It's no longer that the fringe conspiracies are there for you to go find, they're out there, finding you. This is a novelty in human history. Certainly at this scale.

Unless you count the Missionaries, and I'd say that was altogether pretty successful.

People could always find like minded people and communicate, it might have been less efficient but conspiracy groups have always magazines in news stands, published books in stores and libraries, international newsletters, less formal letter based communication and conventions. You were probably less likely to come across them because it took a little more effort and you were in a "mainstream bubble" (I don't mean that negatively) but they were always there.

Saying it didn't exists before the internet is like saying dating didn't exists before it was online.

Speed, scale, accessibility, and the ability to target susceptible people without geographic proximity make it a novel problem.

A person handling out pamphlets (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") can communicate with on the order of 10^1 people per day, and can persuade on the order of 10^1 people per year. The medium is sketchy, the messenger can't be abstracted from the message, one would have to be physically near the messenger, and the messenger would have to be actively trying to communicate with you when you came into proximity.

A person posting links to a (fake news) site (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") via FB can reach on the order of 10^6 people in a day or two. And FB promotes that content to the people who are more susceptible.

Ideas couldn't spread like this ever before.

Before social media, AM talk radio was the same cesspool, with the same content and a similarly sized audience. Facebook just makes it more visible to those that are rightfully disturbed by it.

Yeah. Up until recently, the ability to immediately communicate information to hundreds of thousands of people at once was guarded. Editors economically metered inches of print, networks (the original 4) were ruthlessly inoffensive to avoid pushing people away, radio stations religiously avoided dead air, etc. To build a fringe movement in the past, one could reach up to dozens of people directly or through pamphlets. Using the model of viral spread, the viral load from a pamphlet or from a conspiracy theorist's mouth was too low to infect most people, so the conspiracy would fizzle. If enough susceptible people were blasted with a high enough load of false information, those people could become infected and start spreading the false information themselves, triggering exponential spread, but in the past there weren't good ways to identify susceptible people. Modern platforms, optimizing for engagement/watch time, leveraged the immense amount of data they generate from user behavior to identify clusters of user behavior patterns, predict the cluster a user is most similar to, and feed that user content that activates other users in that cluster. In short, modern platforms make it far easier to both find people susceptible to a false narrative (or ensemble of false narratives), and to spread the false narrative.

Humanity has never faced this phenomena until recently, where anyone can infect hundreds of millions of people with false ideas like "the earth is flat", or "a deadly virus, and strategies to prevent it's spread, should be ignored", or "democracy is a lie and it is not a mechanism for peacefully removing people from power". If we don't demand a solution, we're going to continue to see massive death and destruction from uninformed or even perverse response to disease, climate change, and a myriad of other issues.

People have been believing wildly untrue things since before the dawn of civilization.

Just seeing the threads on the origin of Covid-19 on HN shows that it is very easy to get sucked in conjectures not supported by any facts and to irrationally start believing that something is likely.

I wonder if this is one outcome of the distrust of the government?

Many people are presented with 2 alternatives:

Alternative A) You are an ordinary person with an ordinary job and ordinary pasttimes. You fulfill your role in society like everyone else.

Alternative B) You have an important mission that will change the course of history, to spread the influence of <insert dogmatic belief system here>.

Conspiracy theories, religious fanatism, extreme nationalism, flat earth societies, sanitary anticompliance (anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers), climate change denial... they all have a thing in common: they are not rational and the people behind them are afraid of rationality and science.

Scientific knowledge is something we mostly take on trust, not through first principle.

It is largely impossible for us to operate any other way, no matter how true our knowledge is.

Yeah it’s an endeavor formed around trust. We have to trust each other.

Scientific publications have citations and the findings in them, whether correct or not, are falsifiable...

I never though about how it can fulfill peoples need to be important, relevant. But yeah I think that is part of the appeal.

> Conspiracy theories, religious fanatism, extreme nationalism, flat earth societies, sanitary anticompliance (anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers), climate change denial... they all have a thing in common: they are not rational and the people behind them are afraid of rationality and science.

Actually, I'd disagree. If you dig in to a lot of these theories, there is a kernel of rationality behind them. Many adherents can actually rebut arguments with evidence that makes a surprising amount of sense: there are usually multiple possible explanations for individual phenomena, and if you look at them in isolation, it can be very hard to conclusively demonstrate that the "scientific" answer is actually the best possible explanation. This to me explains why even intellectuals can fall prey to these theories: if you already have a nonconformist streak, the alternative explanations can be interesting to dig into.

Where they fall flat is in overall coherence; these theories often end up with massive gaping seams if you try to expand them from explaining one phenomena. And these seams are so obvious, and yet adherents have no coherent explanation for these seams, that it overshadows whatever kernel of rationality the theory originally had.

All cults and religions are based on flawed logic, justifying and reinforcing its viral load.

Not saying movements don't have some learning and constructive purposes too, but the core of the ideology itself is always full of flawed logic most effective in confusing people.

Most large religions have something in common: as literacy and population density increases (i.e.: more people independently recording their own perspective on an event), miracles become less spectacular and divine revelation stops. Today we have no more columns of fire, no more prophets... nothing.

Legends are passed from generation to generation, and the ones that were more spectacular and entertaining were more likely to be passed to the next generation. So at some moment in history you had a proliferation of spectacular stories and prophets and miracles and divine revelation. But once writing systems are developed and adopted by the general population this no longer happens. Why? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the most likely reason is because people were making stuff up all along. That's why.

Secondly, the afterlife...

The reason people believe in an afterlife is mostly because the brain is designed to look for a path to survival at all times. e.g.: You think about going to work because you need income to go to the grocery store so you can buy food which you will eventually cook and then eat = survival. work -> income -> money -> food -> survival.

But eventually, the brain learns that all paths ultimately lead to death anyways. The brain, however, has defense mechanisms that prevent it from falling into psychological states that are bad for survival, and those defense mechanisms often involve illogical lines of thought. When this happens, your brain will try to get out of that psychological state by making some shit up, such as "look bro, you will die, but right after that, you will continue living". i.e.: the afterlife, souls, etc.

The afterlife, however, is just the beginning. Once you have an afterlife, now you can make rules that dictate what happens there. e.g.: "If you don't pay 10% of your income to me, your afterlife will suck". And once you standardize those rules now you have organized religion.

This is one belief. Another observation is how common consciousness is, and pondering why mind thinks something as common can only happen once per universe.

I would not call it a "kernel of rationality", I would call it a "kernel of creativity"... creativity that can be very clever and complex, but ultimately, creative (i.e.: made up).

Only 72% of Americans trust that their country landed on the Moon in 1969.

The Republican Party ought to take a long, hard look at where their campaign against facts is leading them. It’s not even the party of Nixon anymore.

What do you mean

They know very well where they've wanted it to lead. Do you think otherwise?

So dictatorship was the rightist plan all along then?

Perhaps not the plan, per se, but when your entire ideology relies on falsehoods (like trickle-down economics, and the genetic superiority of white men over everyone else), when you take that to its logical conclusion you must employ authoritarian methods to suppress the reality that proves you're full of bullshit.

Not all of it is bullshit, but my hope is for people to call out the bad motivations and behaviour, in politics and workplace alike. Force them to discuss real issues rather than tribalism.

The identity politics has exactly the same problem, of losing the universal principles and broader perspectives.

Are you implying only one party engages in this?

I could list many conspiracies peddled by the other party but I would be flagged/banned for most. Some less controversial ones might be Trump being elected due to mysterious Russians, and Trump being a secret White Supremacist hiding dog whistles in every other tweet.

"Trump being elected due to mysterious Russians"

The FBI and Mueller special counsel report specifically called out an anti-Clinton campaign by the GRU. No one argues that Trump was elected by Russians, only that they did an awful lot to air Clinton's dirty laundry.

Seems a tad different than 'Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring in a pizza parlor basement'.

But maybe that's just my liberal bias speaking.

I do. I argue he was not, but if you believe in the Russians, surely you beliefs the Chinese elected Biden. Just because you disagree doesn’t make it a conspiracy theory, only your insignificant disagreement.

I don’t remember Hillary Clinton calling Trump’s election fake in Nov 2016 (she conceded the morning after Election Day). There were no calls from Obama asking state legislators to overturn the results, or for VP Biden to just ignore state results and pick electors himself in Jan 2017 (which is what many Republicans are asking Pence to do next week).

Later there was an investigation into Russian election interference authorized by Trump’s own Attorney General. Five people went to prison. That’s not a conspiracy theory.

Speculation about Trump’s motives was fueled by his own extremely bizarre behavior towards Russia. In the infamous Helsinki meeting, he first destroyed interpreter’s notes to hide what was discussed, then took Putin’s side against the American intelligence community. My own feeling is that he did all this simply out of a weird admiration for Putin — but with this much smoke, it’s not surprising there were questions about a fire.

> Five people went to prison.

- 34 indicted.

- 7 pled guilty.

- 5 went to prison. So far.

If this was a witch hunt, we found us a coven.

[1] https://time.com/5556331/mueller-investigation-indictments-g...

Guilty pleas aren't necessarily evidence of guilt. Innocent people can be coerced.

Coercive Plea Bargaining Has Poisoned the Criminal Justice System.

https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/coercive-plea-...

This is a poor argument for white collar crimes.

Why? There are many ways prosecutors can coerce people, and not all of them involve money.

It's hypothetical whataboutism vs the report findings.

It's not hypothetical. General Flynn alleged that prosecutors threatened to prosecute his son if he didn't plead guilty. Those allegations are unproven, but that is how our justice system usually works.

> Former prosecutors say such hardball tactics are routine in criminal cases.

> “I can say with great confidence that kind of pressure is pretty common,” said Shanlon Wu, a former federal prosecutor who now is a defense attorney.[1]

And it is true that Flynn's son was a "subject" of the investigation[2], then General Flynn pled guilty, then nothing happened to his son. Even before Flynn made the allegations, NPR said: "[the plea deal] also apparently avoided prospective charges for Flynn's son."[3]

1: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-30/flynn-stil...

2: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mike-flynn-s-son-subjec...

3: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852582068/mike-flynn-pleaded-...

See, that’s another way of disconnecting reality from your wishes. In most countries, determining guilt is the prerogative of the justice system as it used to be in the US. But that has been corrupted. Belief, that there was a witch hunt exceeds the belief, that the justice system is just. Which gives short-term gains for whoever benefits from the former while the latter undermines the society long term. I have no idea, who did what, but I know a country or two, that is strategically interested in undermining the US democracy in the long run.

Only one party ran and had elected a QAnon senator. That's kind of a QED.

Only one party elected someone who thought putting too many soldiers in Guam would tip the island over.

[citation needed]

One has nothing to do with the other, but you misspelled the Democrat Party.

Rightism and stupid are very well correlated and aligned.

This is DARVO [0]. You're attempting to copy the fascism of the Republicans onto the Democrats. This might have worked better if it weren't for the Republicans' neglect over the past executive term; with hundreds of thousands of Americans dead or rioting because they're tired of starving and being shot, it is increasingly obvious that the Republicans are incapable of leading.

Neoliberalism is terrible, yeah, but your conflation of neoliberalism with neoconservatism is puerile and unhelpful. (And your posting history makes it clear that, because you're wealthy, you don't really give a shit about other people.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO

I think it's hard to define what "believing QAnon" means at this point because the so-called Q drops read like vague fortune cookies that could mean any and everything.

The assumptions behind stories like this always do a lot more work then the polls themselves.

It seems like the poll was just a few thousand people [1]. If we look at some specific poll questions:

> Moreover, fewer than half (47%) are able to correctly

> identify that this statement is false: “A group of

> Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are

> trying to control our politics and media.” Thirty-seven

> percent are unsure whether this theory backed by QAnon is

> true or false, and 17% believe it to be true.

47% identify the statement as false, 17% identify it as true and I assume the rest are unsure. This sounds about right for most unproven things.

I would suggest that given the long list of powerful contacts Epstein is confirmed to have had, his seemingly random rise to wealth, the idea that he wasn't a lone wolf isn't insane.

Also you have to consider that something like "Satan-worshipping" is loaded, as to a religious person anybody conducting such acts could be said to be following the path of Satan. Given the large number of Christians in the US, it's not unreasonable to believe this could have been misinterpreted.

> Nearly half (47%) believe the majority of protests this

> summer were violent, while just 38% correctly indicated

> that this is a false statement.

I am open to be corrected, but by all accounts there was at least some form of arrests at most large protests and many of those were violence related. I personally watched about 20 random live streams on Twitch and each time there was somebody who got into a fight. I imagine they are conflating violent protests with riots (where you have a significant number of agitators)?

I remember watching some news reporter state that the protests had been largely peaceful as a building burned down behind him. I don't think it could be argued that most large news outlets have become political in nature - historically the press and politicians would work hand in hand.

> More than one in three Americans believe in the existence

> of a so-called “deep state;”

My understanding is that the "deep state" is essentially the permanent state - groups such as the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc, that hold enormous amounts of power and act on scales longer than most presidencies and without democratic oversight.

I think that some of what this poll considers to be "fact" is simply from one of these "fact checker" services, which are based on existing evidence and general consensus rather than any kind of real investigation past a Google search by one random person.

[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/npr-misinformation-12...

The Russian collusion conspiracy theory lasted for years, was broadcast on all the MSM news channels, and included many sitting congress members, without any evidence that it was true. Millions of wasted dollars later, and Mueller came up with nothing. The Russian collusion conspiracy theory was the most prevalent conspiracy theory of the last 4 years.

I strongly suggest you read the Mueller report. It's not what you've been led to believe.

"Mueller and his team of prosecutors have now indicted 34 individuals and three Russian businesses on charges ranging from computer hacking to conspiracy and financial crimes."

"Those indictments have led to seven guilty pleas and five people sentenced to prison."

If this doesn't line up with what you've heard, don't believe me, read the actual report. [2]

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/breakdown-indictments-cases-...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

If any group of politicians had been investigated to the depth of the Mueller investigation, the same amount of criminal behavior would have been found. They're all criminals, you have to be to compete.

That opinion even if true changes nothing about the OP or my reply.

The Mueller investigation indicted 34 people. Seven plead guilty and five were sentenced to prison.

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