Dylan Reeve first started looking at conspiracy theorists when they were debating harmless topics - but things changed around 2015. Photo / Supplied.
Dylan Reeve first started looking at conspiracy theorists when they were debating harmless topics - but things changed around 2015. Photo / Supplied.
Did people really land on the moon? How actually killed JFK? And how about Earth itself - flat or not?
Before Covid-19 took over our lives, if you asked people about conspiracy theories, those are the sorts of topics that we would tend to reference.
And they are the types of topics that first saw journalist Dylan Reeve investigate this subculture.
Reeve has spent around 20 years following the growth of conspiracy theories online, from when internet chat forums were still in their infancy to the spread of Covid misinformation in recent years, which he details in his new book, Fake Believe.
"I came into conspiracy theory participation say 20 years ago when the things we were talking about were whether people landed on the moon and was 9/11 an inside job," Reeve told Paula Bennett on her NZ Herald podcast, Ask Me Anything.
"They were conspiracy theories that weren't kind of important and you could argue about them just on a rhetorical basis. You'd go into these conspiracy forums on the internet and you'd kind of just debate with people or read people's weird interpretation."
Reeve said that back then, it seemed like a fun, time-wasting activity debating theories that had limited real-world consequences.
But while many would see Covid as marking the big shift in conspiracy theories, Reeve said that he saw this change come in around 2015.
"The nature of conspiracy theories, or the nature of what was being discussed in these channels, changed, where we went from these kinds of unimportant 'argue about the technicalities' conspiracy theories to a place where we were looking at these grand political conspiracy theories and whether or not kids were really killed in a school shooting, and if they weren't, were their parents government actors and here's their address and here's their phone number and look, you can see they sold their property in this timing.
"The nature of it changed and it became, it became really personal to the people who were finding themselves targeted and to the people working for organisations that suddenly found themselves the subject of this stuff."
Prominent American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones recently was ordered to pay nearly US$1 billion in damages for lies he had spread about the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.
Conspiracy theories are now much harder to avoid, with the discussions around Covid-19 over the past two years taking many theories on the virus, vaccines, and thoughts on various Government and world leaders mainstream.
Fake Believe is Dylan Reeve's new book. Photo / Supplied
Reeve said that there are theories that many people already felt these ways, but it would have been much harder a few years ago to talk to a neighbour about something like the moon landing, whereas Covid is on the news every night, opening up the potential to discussion the disinformation around it.
For his advice on how to interact with friends or family members who believe in these theories, Reeve said that some people may have to accept that it is too difficult to try and have these discussions.
"Someone who genuinely believes these things that they're talking about, who genuinely believes that vaccines are part of a global genocide and genuinely believes that Covid was engineered in a lab to depopulate the planet - those things are existential.
"And it's no different to talking to someone who believes in any given particular sort of religious theology about their existence on the planet and how they should live their lives and how everyone else should live their lives and what's important and what's not. We're talking about like deep existential stuff about how the world operates and how humanity. should be so you are not talking someone out of it straight away."
Reeve said that the easiest way to is to calmly and logically go through some of the grand theories - taking 9/11 as an example and the number of people that would need to be involved to fake an event of that scale - finding "loose edges" you can discuss without yelling at each other.
"To some extent, sometimes the advice is just ignore it."
