Responding to the spread of conspiracy theories

ABSTRACT

Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than ever and pose a real danger to our societies. It is natural to accuse the consumers of conspiracy theories of irrationality – that they are either not looking at or appropriately sensitive to all the available evidence. In this paper, I attempt to determine if we can make sense of this general idea. I argue that we cannot: conspiracy theories do not spread because the people who believe them are irrational – at least, not necessarily so. In addition, I explore some alternative strategies for responding to the problem of the spread of conspiracy theories. I argue that in addition to confrontational strategies such as social shaming, we need more constructive programs of community activism to battle the spread of conspiracy theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy theories
• echo chambers
• shaming
• activism
• social epistemology
• disagreement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Anderson (2021). As I edit this manuscript, the events of the Uvalde shooting are shaking the nation to the core. However, this hasn't stopped similar disappointingly predictable ‘false flag’ theories to spread on the internet suggesting that the shooting was staged by powerful forces ‘out of a playbook’ with malicious political motives (Siders 2022).

2 See Clary, Allman, and Bohn (2016).

3 See Swami et al. (2011). Cited in Cassam (2019).

4 See, for instance, Cassam (2016).

5 See Sanders (2021).

6 For our purposes, we can understand a conspiracy to be a plot by a small group of individuals who are working together in secret to do something harmful.

7 Some philosophers, notably, Dentith (2014), defend a revision of the concept of conspiracy theory such that it sheds this negative connotation. For the purposes of this paper, I ignore such a view. For critical discussion, see Napolitano (2021).

8 I am following Cassam (2019) here.

9 See, for instance, Rini (2017), Blake-Turner (2020), Mukerji (2018) and Lackey (2021) among many others.

10 For Frankfurt's original account of bullshit see Frankfurt (2005).

11 See Kirk et al. (2020).

12 As I mentioned in footnote 1, in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, there appears to be no shortage of baseless claims and CTs about the incident. Arguably, many of these constitute similar cases where the creators don't believe them to be true. Alex Jones, for instance, only 2 days after the incident, has suggested that the shooting was orchestrated by ‘opportunistic motives’ (Kaonga 2022).

13 My usage of epistemic bubbles roughly follows Nguyen (2020), who distinguishes between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Unlike the former phenomenon in which certain voices are left out, in echo chambers certain sources are discredited. As we shall see in the next subsection (Section 3.2), the latter constitutes a much more interesting phenomenon and calls for a more involved treatment, which we will turn to below.

14 See Rini (2017, E51-2) for relevant citations for these examples.

15 Worsnip (2019, 7–8) claims that normative reliability of some source does not support its descriptive reliability, and so normative disagreement is not grounds for trusting a source on its factual assertions. However, he fails to appreciate that normative reliability is what we might call a ‘general’ feature of someone's character: it shows that the individual has goodwill and is in the business of doing the right thing. This is different from reliability about matters of fact, which is domain-specific. If, for instance, someone is a reliable mechanic, that shows nothing one way or another about their reliability about other domains. However, if someone has a good character, then that does seem to constitute good reason to trust them in matters of thought and knowledge.

16 Allen-Ebrahimian (2021).

17 This point is familiar from the debate on epistemology of disagreement. See, for instance, Kelly (2010).

18 The debate goes back to Goldman (2001), which famously argued that non-independent testimony should be discounted. For other challenges against this view, see Lackey (2013).

19 See Lackey (2021) for more on the issue of noise.

20 On the news media side, Worsnip (2019) argues that we have an obligation to diversify our sources.

21 For a recent development, see Wagner (2021).

22 See Nguyen (2018) for the analogy between echo chambers and cults.

23 The other five features are: speculative, contrarian, esoteric, amateurish, and pre-modern.

24 Cassam in turn is following Sunstein and Vermeule (2009) in identifying CTs with the self-sealing feature.

25 For a recent example of this argument, see Napolitano (2021).

26 It is worth emphasizing that it would be a mistake to understand the language of ‘resistance’ and ‘recalcitrance’ psychologically; it is crucial that epistemic preemption by neutralization and its kin are mechanism that create a rational resistance to evidence in the sense that under the non-ideal circumstances that we all find ourselves, one is not failing, epistemically speaking, to be as one should be.

27 See O'Reilly (2015). Cited in Begby (2021).

28 See Nguyen (2018).

29 While a proper treatment of Napolitano (2021) goes beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that even though she takes note of the mechanism of preemption by discrediting, she confesses that ‘I find it hard to make sense of Keeley's claim that seemingly disconfirming evidence could be construed as supporting evidence, rather than just as neutral evidence’ (fn. 20). I believe that this reveals a detrimental blindsight in her overall argument, but I cannot argue the point here.

30 For the record, while I highly doubt that such an individual actually exists, the point remains that someone in the right context could be justified in trusting Jones. I will return to this issue below.

31 See Kirk et al. (2020).

32 See, for instance, Schoenfield (2014) among many others. For criticism, see, for instance, Dogramaci and Horowitz (2016).

33 For a relatively early endorsement of a similar conclusion, see Baurmann (2007). Baurmann's term for echo chambers is ‘fundamentalist equilibrium’ and he argues that groups who are in such epistemic networks may end up believing fundamentalist ideologies without any violations of rationality.

34 One might object that even the groomed Conspiracy Theorist is falling short of an epistemic ideal: They believe something to be true for which there is good contrary evidence. However, that would constitute a change of subject. The relevant notion of rationality for our purposes is one whose primary role is in cases of second-person advice. This notion of rationality minimally requires that it be deployable in giving constructive advice. The notion of rationality that this objection relies on, however, is merely classificatory that categorizes beliefs as good or bad, and thus departs from our intended notion. For more discussion of the distinction between different senses of normativity see, for instance, Kolodny (2005) and Thomson (2008) among others.

35 It is beyond the scope of this paper to expand further on this point. See Blake-Turner (2020) and Lackey (2021) among others for further discussion in the context of discussing fake news.

36 Another proponent of this kind of strategy is Lackey (2021).

37 It might be argued that while both outing and shaming involve socially exposing an individual for the view that they hold or embody, only shaming is done with the intention of creating a feeling of shame in the individual. Strictly speaking, on this way of thinking, exposing someone without an accompanied intention to create a feeling of shame (even if it incidentally leads to it) is not a case of shaming. As it should be clear from my discussion so far, I'm focusing on the concept of shaming here, and, as the quote below shows, though Cassam sometimes uses the label ‘outing’, his proposed strategy is also shaming, that is, exposing someone with the intention of creating a feeling of shame.

38 See Walker et al. (2021).

39 See Kirzinger et al. (2021).

40 See Ndugga et al. (2021).

41 See Burch and Walker (2021).

42 See Tuskegee Study–Timeline–CDC–NCHHSTP (2021).

43 See Barbaro (2017).

44 See Hunter-Gault (2019).

45 Thanks to Peter Murphy for invaluable support and written comments on an earlier version of the paper, and Alejandro Aarango for insightful discussion. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer, whose comments helped to strengthen the arguments of this paper.