A woman participates in an anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protest in London. Photo / AP
ANALYSIS:
The harrowing scenes in Washington DC last week were somehow both unprecedented and utterly predictable.
Many of us had managed to push from our minds the unedifying sight of a demagogic president in the pathetic death throes of his term, bellowing conspiracy theories across social media to anyone who would listen. The storming of the US Capitol at once disabused us of that complacency, a disturbing reminder of the havoc that conspiracy theory and disinformation can wreak.
Disinformation, the deliberate propagation of falsehood, has a long and ignoble past.
Conspiracy theory, too, has been with us for all recorded history. But what is incredibly disconcerting is how prominent falsehood has become in all spheres, from politics to medicine.
As we struggle through this first great pandemic of the 21st century, approximately 29 per cent of the UK population believe Covid originated as part of a conspiracy - demonstrated by the bizarre New Year's Eve spectacle of a crowd chanting "Covid is a hoax" at exhausted doctors outside St Thomas' Hospital.
The sheer abundance of falsehoods, online and off, prompted the World Health Organisation to acknowledge that we are facing a shadow crisis - an infodemic, with "an overabundance of information, some accurate and some not, that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance".
It is crucial to understand how we got here - and what can be done now. QAnon, the conspiracy theory group at the centre of the attempted coup, which was promoted on social media by Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot dead during the siege - functions as an extreme example.
This movement, at its most essential, pivots on the premise that a secret cabal of blood-drinking paedophiles is controlling the world. Outlandish and vulgar as this narrative undoubtedly is, it is guilty of a deeper offence: it is not even original. The exact same charges have been flung mindlessly at Jews, Freemasons and other minorities throughout history, with deadly results.
This warped modern revival of the medieval slur posits that a sinister elite of Hollywood celebrities and liberal politicians run an international child-sex ring, and only Donald Trump can end their reign.
This would be laughable were it not embraced with such a fervent passion - an estimated 33 per cent of Republican voters indicated that they believed it to be "mostly true".
To understand why a conjecture so divorced from reality could be that roundly accepted, we need to look at the patterns of exposure: QAnon is entirely an online movement, with tentacles across social media. Initially viewed as an amusing sideshow in 2017, it quickly became apparent that far from being dismissed, the nonsensical narrative was becoming massively amplified online - and linked with acts of violence.
Belatedly banned by Facebook and others in 2020, it had by then succeeded in radicalising many with promises of an uprising to come.
This should not surprise us. As early as 1996, researchers worried that internet users might seek out only that which reinforces their beliefs, isolating them from other perspectives and conflicting evidence. This they termed "cyberbalkanization", alluding to the fractured state of the Balkans.
This insight proved prescient - a 2016 study lamented that misinformation thrived online particularly because users tended to "aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation and polarisation".
That same year, the Columbia Journalism Review warned that as we became curators of our own media, the net result would be increased polarisation. Inside our own echo chambers, bad ideas are frequently reinforced rather than challenged - QAnon's imperviousness to the intrusions of reality is a by-product of precisely this.
The troubling reality is that each of us is susceptible to disinformation, regardless of political leaning, intelligence, or level of education. Vaccine hesitancy is a powerful exemplar of this. After clean water, nothing has saved more lives. Yet in 2019, the WHO declared vaccine hesitancy a top 10 threat to public health, after plunging uptake globally gave rise to a deadly resurgence of once-conquered diseases.
This is not the product of mere complacency - it instead bears the fingerprints of anti-vaccine propaganda. Exposure to vaccine conspiracy theory is a major determinant as to whether parents choose to vaccine or not, and anti-vaccine activists have been incredibly successful at weaponising social media to spread poisonous fictions.
Crucially, most who do not vaccinate are not dyed-in-the-wool anti-vaccine zealots but simply frightened parents eager to do what is best for their children. Parent groups, especially, are accosted with disinformation, engineered to be frightening and visceral, despite its deficit of veracity.
Cynical as this is, it is extremely effective, exploiting our human tendency to emote first and reason later. The "availability heuristic" is the observation that we afford greater weight to information easily recalled, biasing us towards vivid anecdotes over more sober-headed analysis.
Anti-vaccine propaganda is darkly effective at frightening parents into a state of paralysis. In my years working on vaccine campaigns and science outreach, this is something I have seen first-hand with parents from all walks of life.
One's education or training does not render one immune. An assertion therefore may have zero basis whatsoever, but this is rarely an impediment to acceptance. The most toxic disinformation is impervious to the intrusions of reality and resistant to correction.
Part of the reason is the bizarre phenomena of "illusory truth". This is the observation that repeated exposure to falsehoods primes us to accept them as implicitly true, even when we know them on an intellectual level to be false.
This has long been known to politicians, who muster it to great effect. Napoleon reportedly stated that the only figure in rhetoric of any worth was repetition. This is a playbook by which Trump has been guided, repeatedly insisting that the election has been stolen, despite this being an abject fiction.
Worse again, conspiracy theories rarely occur in isolation. Those who hold one tend to accept further still - often as a matter of necessity. The philosopher WV Quine talked of our web of belief, the idea that all our conceptions are deeply entangled. To accept even one outlandish idea has a spiral of impacts on other concepts and how we think.
Frustration with lockdown and questioning its efficacy is a reasonable position, but inducing the stronger premise that "lockdowns do nothing" into our beliefs could force us to jettison conflicting ideas and emphasise justificatory arguments supportive of that new strand.
Accepting this might lead us to reduced confidence in authorities, and a chorus of higher-order beliefs: scientists are incompetent, governments corrupt, and media untrustworthy - perhaps even the belief that Covid is a hoax.
An initial axiom can all too easily create a cascade, altering the entire web of belief as strand pulls on strand.
Equally, the journey from voting for Trump in 2016 based on promises to regenerate the rust belt to attempting insurrection in 2021 may flow from a single misplaced belief, galvanised by a storm of toxic fictions.
Perhaps this was the case for Ashli Babbitt, having seemingly transitioned from honoured military veteran to QAnon-inspired insurrectionist. If so, her story is sadly far from unique.
Much of the blame lies with social media firms, who have for years profited from the dissemination of dangerous nonsense. But we also need to realise that viral disinformation is incredibly infectious, damaging all of us.
Just as we take pains to minimise our exposure to infectious agents, we should strive towards an analogous policy of information hygiene, only accepting and sharing substantiated, verified claims.
While some might be more susceptible than others to the harms of disinformation, it is damaging not only to our collective wellbeing, but our very societal cohesion. As the dust settles on the Capitol, we must remember that Pandora's box is truly open - we need to learn to live with the consequences of that.
Dr David Robert Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist and the author of The Irrational Ape (Simon & Schuster).
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