Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube
news.umich.edu
news.umich.edu
I used to be a journalist before my career in tech. In my opinion, the real culprit is that news outlets now have the wrong incentives.
When people still used to buy printed newspapers, you had to pay for your news so you better get well researched articles for your hard earned money. [1]
With the rise of internet news, that incentive is no longer in place. Yes there are paid news outlets on the Internet but the majority of people don't pay for a subscription. What gets you most views does rarely align with high journalistic standards. [2] In a way, everything is a tabloid now.
[1] If you are at least as old as me, you might remember that reading a certain newspaper rather than another was almost seen as a status symbol. I remember journalists saying things like "I love working at [newspaper X] because of our fine readership, they challenge me to write high quality articles".
[2] With a few obvious exceptions like Panama Papers etc.
You know how one sausage is made. But every factory is filthy just like yours.
I work with "the establishment". It has the wrong incentives too, just different ones.
And yet I wonder with the acceptance of tech and the downfall of institutions… isn’t one of the things people are nostalgic for or made the past so great was basically institutions?
It would be interesting to extend the study to other categories where this trust gap does not exist. Would anti-establishment content also get more engagement in say the woodworking niche?
This isn't a justification for irrational conspiracy theory (which are generally harmless, yet occasionally highly catastrophic). It's that the establishment whack-em-all approach is not working, and is probably exacerbating their problem.
It’s an education and channel incentive problem. Our kids’ literacy is crashing [1]. And most Americans get their news through channels that are incentivised by selling ads.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/us-students-reading-math-s...
The literacy crash is alarming, and is no doubt agitating this situation in a major way. However, I think what we are experiencing is something like a kind of siloing of private realities. Not the pearl-clutching 'echo chamber' discourse from 2019. But an increasing lack of social competency amongst younger people that is disallowing them to be present others in the world itself.
This is why I still think it is a power problem. Government, however incompetent, still has the monopoly on control and policy. They have experts yelling at them everyday about these problems. But their answer does seem to be more censorship and surveillance, rather than addressing the causes of these problems. As I mentioned, this only exacerbates the problem and makes it more socially dangerous.
The power hypothesis doesn’t explain Flat Eartherism. That’s just stupid people believing what I cannot imagine started as anything but a tantrum.
Incorrect. As with most if not all conspiracy theories, flat-earthism incorporates anger at "the establishment" because "the establishment" is hiding the truth. And this is the hook. If you can be convinced that a secret cabal is manipulating all science, controlling all governments, censoring all media and filtering all information in order to keep the basic nature of reality hidden from humanity - which flat earthers do believe - then you're susceptible to someone suggesting who that cabal might be. You know who.
As you say, the medical conspiracies have really evolved since covid. I'm just glad we had covid when we did, because I feel that 5 years later people are so much more ignorant and less willing to all go through something together for the greater good.
With that said, I think the lot of conspiracy that just doesn't really hurt anyone but the believer. Aliens, moon landings, illuminati, etc. Kind of the modern day opiate of the masses.
I know a lot of people who have had to cut off family members because they got too deep into conspiracy theories and it's pretty much always weird political ones.
For a few reasons I personally find that the best medicine is just to nod along with these people and watch them give away their ideological hand:
a) You know where they stand and who you are dealing with.
b) They can, however rarely, be forced to actually confront the irrational logic when sharing it.
c) I think it is the compassionate thing to do, as people just often want to spout these theories as a much needed release valve. After all, people believe this stuff often because of a confusion or frustration they have with their own lives.
I'm more and more convinced that these are gateway conspiracy theories. That's where my dad started innocently enough. I remember listening to AM Coast to Coast with him. Art Bell and those "innocent" conspiracies. A couple decades later he's a completely different person with completely different beliefs all still aligned to conspiracy theories he picked up on AM radio. But now it's about Muslims taking over the country and wanting to kill or convert us all and the Clinton's and Obama's plans to enable Sharia takeover.
They seem to prefer implausible conspiracies, or where there is some ambiguity, such as documents that aren't public.
Not really. They’re wacky because being believed by the establishment, they have consequences. I’m not bothered by flat Earthers and vaccine deniers. I am bothered when they’re in power, because now their beliefs have influence.
Humans absorb what we see around us and our identity is now also formed by what we consume. So essentially you get a type of flywheel where you become more and more sucked in by virtue of watching more.
This actually sounds like something from a fascist state. It's a completely contradictory, manipulative statement.
Where did you source that "research"? Orwell's Ministry of Truth?
New fresh relevant conspiracies buried in my threads!
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
Not a new phenomena, but rather a reminder of what civilizations often offer. =3
If Democracy is simply Oligarchy with voting as a decoration and sometime even that was gamed, then to the hell with this democracy.
> If Democracy is simply Oligarchy with voting as a decoration and sometime even that was gamed, then to the hell with this democracy
Do you really think you’ll be treated better in a quasi-monarchy?
In general we consider democracy > monarchy because good monarchies are rare and far between, so democracy is the least bad option.
And no, I don’t think Trump could be Augustus. Augustus and Caesar beat their enemies and cut them down like chicken. We are more civilized now, but I don’t think Trump is willing and can do enough sweeping. It is only by sweeping away the old aristocratic that the new ones can building a new Empire.
We have a pretty good hint!
> do you really think you will be treated better under Augustus or the Senate?
Augustus’s rein started with him engineering a peninsula-wide famine and economic collapse. He grew up after the civil war. But promptly after him you got Trajan.
> we consider democracy > monarchy because good monarchies are rare and far between, so democracy is the least bad option
Sort of. There is also the whole part about being able to fire the leaders once in a while.
> We are more civilized now, but I don’t think Trump is willing and can do enough sweeping
Trump would absolutely mow down Americans if his life depended on it, most leaders would, this is what makes dictatorships and other systems without a peaceful transition of power so dangerous.
> only by sweeping away the old aristocratic that the new ones can building a new Empire
Octavianus was a Claudian, one of Rome’s most prestigious patrician families. Most of the Emperors were also patricians. (Rome collapsed shortly after the aristocracy actually lost control. It’s literally referred to as the fall of Rome.)
If America goes monarchy, it would be in a way that ensconced our current elites into a generational aristocracy far more powerful than what Americans think is social immobility today.
My thought is, the US reached the peak of all Empires. It is Pax Americana, and every empire imploded whenever it stopped expanding. We had some pretty good time in the late 1800s and better time back in 1945 and 1990. There were struggles but we always managed to plow through because there were spaces to expand, and the elites back then, TBF, were better than this batch (I was reading Baltzell's books a while ago). But the good time was over, and there is not much space to expand, so the "safer" way is to reform -- but we rarely saw this happen, e.g. both Brother Gracchus were killed by the Senate -- and eventually Caesar came up and swept the floor, and I have no faith in this batch of elites.
What are you basing this on? The patrician families continued to rein under the Empire. Which side do you think backed Sulla’s dictatorship? Which side do you think felt (and feels) constrained by elections and democratic norms?
> It is Pax Americana, and every empire imploded whenever it stopped expanding
One, source? Because plenty of great civilisations across history reached stable states for hundreds if not thousands of years.
And two, America is still expanding. The economy is growing. Post industrialisation, there are more routes to goodies than conquering territory. (I can’t think of a single war of conquest since China annexed Tibet that has gone well for the invader since WWII.)
Be that as it may. Expansionist empires usually shrinks dramatically once they reached their peak. Both Roman and the British are examples, as well as many Chinese dynasties. The East Roman Empire did survive for much longer so it is also possible for the US to go on for a lot longer. I think the Inca was also kinda stable before the Spanish came.
> And two, America is still expanding. The economy is growing. Post industrialisation, there are more routes to goodies than conquering territory. (I can’t think of a single war of conquest since China annexed Tibet that has gone well for the invader since WWII.)
I do hope that we can drag through this period and make some reformation happen. But I don't have high hope for the current batch of elites. Sure the number is growing.
I’m sure those things are not helping, but America’s had a hateful streak for longer than they existed. It’s always been here but mostly hidden under shame and a veneer of basic politeness. Recent political rhetoric has encouraged this hate to go “mask off” and open up with it. Now it’s ok and totally normalized to openly and loudly hate, and broadcast that hate through tech.
And definitely neither are any of the "alternative" sources you think are telling you the real truth.
A key smell test is: Does receiving pushback or counter evidence strengthen your conviction that you are correct? If so, you're going down a dangerous path. You're painting yourself into a corner where you will have a lot of trouble changing your mind, even if you're wrong.
The "main stream media" is the worst source, except for most of the other ones. It's not valuable because it is gospel - it's plain to see that the media is fallible. It's valuable because it adheres to any standard of evidence whatsoever while producing content at scale. It's like what people sometimes say about Wikipedia, it's the best place to begin your research but it doesn't have to end there.
The parallels with religion are obvious here too. I would guess that the fall or organized religion participation in America directly matches the rise in political zealotry and/or conspiracy theory belief. There’s always something people believe more strongly the more it is opposed.
A lot of religions teach that reality and God's will is mysterious and open to interpretation. That can be the cornerstone of an epistemic humility, if you cultivate it that way. (I'm agnostic for what it's worth.)