[Music] for decades there's been a group of people that believe that we never landed on the moon some say that climate change is simply a hoax and we all know that there is a group of people that despite hundreds of years of clear-cut evidence they maintained that the earth is flat but conspiracy theories are nothing new in the age of tick-tock and Twitter though theorists weave misinformation into our social media platforms and that's where unfounded conspiracy theories become amplified in this special edition of the cube we're going to be looking at why people believe conspiracies who are behind some of the biggest trending online and delve into how this misinformation goes from fringe to mainstream conspiracy theories are often complicated multifaceted and tangential on one theory that has gone viral across the globe has all of those same characteristics it appears that this conspiracy theory that is baseless there is no supporting evidence for this started back on Twitter in mid-june now Ben Collins he is a disinformation reporter with NBC News he tweeted about this spotting this particular tweet and in a detail threat he has debunked this conspiracy theory this user known to be a part of Kuhn on I'm gonna go back to who they are later she tweeted this saying my spidey senses are tingling pointing specifically to cabinets that were on sale on the furniture platform Wayfair she questioned as to why they were so expensive and also why these cabinets were named after female names now this theory went from Twitter right away across to the platform reddish there's a theory a conspiracy theory platform thread here on reddit and people they're questioning and saying that this was in fact a front for human trafficking the reason why these were so expensive they jumped from expensive cabinets to a human trafficking ring saying that the names here were corresponding to names of missing people in the United States again there was never any supporting evidence for this but the theory went global we took a look at Google Trends within the top five countries we have the United States Canada but also people in Ireland Turkey and the United Kingdom talking about this this is a screenshot from a Trends map which the visual aid showing you some of the trends this week and Wayfair again one of the top trends in Turkey we also look to cry tango that is a till we use here in the cube to look at interactions likes comments and shares on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram interactions here on Facebook for Wayfarer at 1 million but on Instagram four and a half million interactions showing how broad this conspiracy theory really has become now we asked Wayfarer about this and this is a statement they gave us here in the cube saying of course there is no truth to these claims addressing the first claim that was about the cabinet's way first said that the reason why they are so expensive is because they are industrial-grade saying that they were accurately priced but they did say that they were going to change the description of those cabinets and we're going to re-upload it back to the site once those descriptions were changed however the conspiracy theory then changed from the cabinets to pillows such as this now this pillow was online and the price here was nearly ten thousand dollars and we asked Wayfarer why this pillar was costing so much and they said that this was a price glitch and it's not the first time we've seen a price glitch for example this is something that happened within Amazon back in 2019 they had cameras that were costing camera lenses costing $13,000 a glitch meant that that price dropped to $94 so we have seen price glitches in the past but just taking one more tangent of this conspiracy theory there was this video that went at this picture that went viral with regards to the Wayfarer conspiracy people saying that this was ghilane Maxwell along cycling Maxwell they said was the president of operations within wafer first of all we've haven't seen any president of operations our title we haven't seen any evidence that that exists but also this person is not connected to wafer this is in fact a businessman this picture an event back in the early 2000s looking at the event we saw all the people that were there such as Keira Knightley such as the now President of the United States and his wife Donald Trump and Melania Trump this is very easily debunked however the conspiracy theory still on our social media platforms another question then we have is who's pushing this conspiracy theory and many people who have been sharing us are part of the group known as Kuhn on now we've known them since 2016 their group that claim that there's a deep state within the United States saying that there are people on the left-leaning side of politics who are part of this human trafficking sex ring that this conspiracy theory they're often very very charged very baseless how they seem to be gaining real momentum and one conspiracy theory that started in 2016 it's coming back onto our social media with social media feeds now Matthews gonna tell you more a baseless fairy suggested that the Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile child trafficking ring run out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC this known as pizza gate it began as an obscure phenomenon fortune that's an anonymous online messaging forum we've previously seen in the cube for its associations with its alt right but this soon transcended into other online forms the likes of Reddit YouTube for making its way into the news media and dr. mark tutors from the University of Amsterdam told me more about how Pizza Gate went from fringe to mainstream you could read that initially as a certain kind of like a sick joke that was that was done for the amusement of the people in this message board and that then managed to go viral shortly thereafter with the help of number of established alt right twitter twitter celebrities and then it kind of climbed the the up through the layers of the web from fortune into Alex Jones's YouTube channel and then eventually into the mainstream media now this theory also had real-world consequences when a man opened fire in a pizza restaurant in DC claiming he was searching for a human trafficking ring in a statement by Washington DC police they said he was self investigating Pizza Gate what they called a fiction online conspiracy theory there is no evidence for this no investigation has been launched and no victims have come forward but despite this pizza gate remains a trending topic today and the reason for this as outlined in an article by The Daily Beast is because of tick-tock the popular video sharing platform where a number of users are sharing videos with hashtag pizza gate or alternatives to try and gain trending topics and isn't just on tick-tock we've seen on Google Trends have a look at this graph to show you the difference where Peter gate became a trending topic when it broke into the news media in 2016 and once again whereas Speight in 2020 around the world and it's the same thing on crowd tangle analyzing Facebook again you can see spikes in both 2016 and 2020 to the extent to which around the world it had more than 440,000 interactions so it's a basis for you but it is still getting a lot of people talking and Seana this isn't just in the United States we've also seen how it's become a trending topic in recent days in the likes of Italy Turkey and also Germany and telegram it's a messaging platform one researcher has found over 100,000 people on 1q non-german telegram chat alone we're going to speak into him after the break we're also going to be speaking to a psychologist who's got to talk us through why people believe conspiracy theories stay tuned [Music] welcome back to this special edition of the cube 20/20 has been a year where conspiracy theories have reached new heights but how do they make it onto our social media feeds and how influential are they well to discuss this I'm joined by two experts first of all we have Marc Andre argentino a PhD candidate and an Associate Fellow at the global network on extremism and technology and we also have dr. Daniel jolly he is a psychology professor senior lecturer at Northumbria University who also studies the psychological consequences of conspiracy theories well first of all thank you very much both for joining us on this topic and Daniel I'm gonna start with you and a question that you've probably heard of many times before why do people believe in conspiracy theories theories that are often always baseless so there's a whole host of different reasons the one way to think about it is that can spoon theory seem to bloom in times of crisis in society it's when we're feeling uncertain perilous we're trying to understand the world there's also other factors such as potentially I need to feel unique or intergroup examples so we like to believe in conspiracy theories about people the group there are Democrats about Republicans Republicans about Democrats to in essence oh we find ourselves in a scenario where we feel uncertain it could be a total package or change it could be a virus outbreak Markovic 19 we've many more drawn to conspiracy narratives well marc-andre you have done very detailed research about the group Q&R now we touched on that previously just touched on it but who exactly are they and are they really influential within Europe their influence in Europe is starting queueing on as a core is a group of conspiracy theorists centered around the belief that there's this malign deep state organization of satanic pedophiles that are looking to control the world and Donald Trump is the only open saving us and over the past six months there's been a huge uptick in activity around this group in Europe some of the hot spots are Germany Italy France at the moment but they are present across Europe in approximately 16 17 different nations and I guess they're starting to find residence with the no global crisis that we're going on right now which brings in political economic and health insecurities and individuals are trying to find answers to very difficult questions well Daniel we have conspiracy theories we've had them before but one question I want to ask you here in the cube we debunk conspiracy theories we try to debunk them and fact check them but would you characterize them as misinformation or disinformation what would you characterize conspiracy theories as so construed theories are a different thing to misinformation and because something could just be fake not true whereas conspiracy theories he offers the idea that there's a group of conspirators doing something for their own interests of course misinformation is a flourishing ground for conspiracy narratives but still I think it should be important to these conspiracies and ensure that our platforms online are full of the facts but now see them as very different things but they can't work together so Marc Andre you again just taking two non as an example of that cue non that seems to be mounting right now in politics and US politics are they becoming more mainstream I believe they are and just looking at the numbers over the past six months we've seen on social media at least on Facebook it's a 651 percent increase on cue and on content and almost a 300 percent increase in groups and followers and it's about 80 percent increase on Twitter but also we've seen a huge increase in cue non candidates in the looking for congressional positions that have at least given credence or used cue anon as a platform to campaign upon in the US and this has given rise to a mainstreaming effect because it's no longer a group of powerless individuals that are you using conspiracy theories but rather it is a group of individuals that are in positions of power or vying for positions of power that are using this and it's giving it more credence when you're talking about this as well what are the real-world consequences to conspiracy theories I think the two more important ones we'd have to consider right now would especially in the pandemic is one the possible public health threat q and on has played a role or other conspiracy theorists have played a role in spreading medical disinformation promoting alternative remedies or just denying the effectiveness of wearing no facial protections to prevent the spread of diseases that has a direct consequence on public health around the world but also you know we could think of potential threats to violence as there have been some cases of Q non-adherence well performed either acts of violence and in one case one individuals allegedly charged with an act of terrorism and now when it comes to our elections it raises a lot of questions about protecting our democratic institutions as a group that usually you know promotes and amplifies a lot of myths and disinformation Daniel you know you have been working with regards to the psychological consequences of conspiracy theories I'm gonna put the same question to you what are the real-world consequences to this but those examples are exactly right and we have data to demonstrate that those people who believe in conspiracy Riis are less likely to follow compliance advice so from the government to maybe follow self-isolation because they don't trust that official information but we also know that because people who believe in conspiracy Riis are more likely to be willing to act in a violent way against those who deceive to be conspiring I recently had some research published that looked into 5g conspiracy beliefs and the potential leak of 19 and we found that those people who believed in these conspiracies were more willing to actually go out and burn down pylons and be aggressive towards the engineers and we found that this relationship was potentially caused by anger because people who believe in these conspiracies it makes them angry and these angry you may motivate them to go out and call out the conspirators so conspiracies have real-world consequences and Daniel you know you've been studying again the psychological effect of this why is it so difficult to debunk these conspiracy theories and talk about conspiracy theories to those who believe them so construed theories are important very very people's understanding of the world whereby they may gauge in confirmation bias where their beliefs govern what they think about a city so information that goes against their beliefs their mom's better to discredit it doesn't necessarily go along with what their belief of course inoculation giving people facts he's important could ensuring that people have the facts of it can spook theory content can reduce belief it can spook theories in the Jenna population those who had our highest ardent strong conspiracy theorists it's much more challenging could it be down to making sure people feel empowered in society so they don't actually need to rely on conspiracy narratives could that be one way to combat them it's a challenging game but I think it's really important to look into ways to combat because as we said they their consequences are real world mark Andre I'm gonna put this to you now you've been looking at cue and on and more broadly now a conspiracy theories to do you think that they live in bubbles in the digital sphere or are they cross-platform they're definitely cross-platform however in a way they do live in a specific type of bubble if you run experiments creating new accounts on let's say virtual machines you'll see very rapidly if you start going into the queue on world or a conspiracy theory world your algorithms are gonna be biased in a way where even if you try to get off of these type of networks you're only going to receive a specific type of information but we also see that you know it's on Twitter it's on Facebook it's on telegram there aren't reddit they're on messaging apps there is a multi-platform multi-sectoral phenomenon and it's very difficult if someone gets into this network see really get out of it because everything is filtered through this very specific lens on so Daniel let's just imagine for a second that we live in a world where there's no social media platforms let's just forget about tick-tock and Twitter for one moment do you believe in this world that we would still have conspiracy theories 100 and 100 percent because conspiracy theories have existed and are flourished without the internet there are many many many examples of conspiracy employment history and indeed conspiracy which have been with her since the start of time so the role of the Internet I think is really interesting one I think it's made them more visible and were able to actually monitor them and see them in real time than and that's that's new with the internet but I do think these motives are United whereby crisis in history would have auto bread conspiracy narratives but instead the way we talk about them is different it would have been rude to letter to journalists who talking face-to-face but I do still think we would have got to these beliefs these kind of theories without beans they're just maybe not as quickly Marc Andre I'm gonna finish this off with you where the responsibility for social media platforms for theory that are started by groups like Q non and threaded through social media do you think that social media companies should be taking more responsibility I think it's very difficult for platforms to deal with something like conspiracy theory and queueing on especially in let's say countries were they both are these companies exist let's say in the United States free speech is something that's very protected and q and on is not necessarily a group like let's say isis where violent extremism is the core element it's not a terrorist organization and trying to protect you know individuals from that type of speech is hard now in the context of co vid the platforms have come out with regulations discussing covetous information as a way of removing that type of toxic information but I think the platforms need to reevaluate how this type of content is promoted and searched for and is found on some individuals timelines without necessarily impacting freedom of expression and I that is a very delicate dance and one that I'm happy I do know have to try to find a solution to it was great speaking to both of you dr.
Daniel jolly your senior lecturer in psychology at Northumbria University and we have marc-andre argentino you are a a PhD candidate an Associate Fellow at the global network on extremism and technology thank you very much both well do stay with us because there's lots more to come particularly we're going to be talking after the break about the power of algorithms amid this age of conspiracy theories conspiracy theories about the moon-landing were around long before the age of instagram twitter and tick-tock and the question is now how platforms tackle the spread here in the cube we have examined a number of different social networks searching for that term of that online group QR nan and it's fair to say there are different results for example if you go on Pinterest and search for QR nan there are no results displayed because they say this violates their community guidelines but contrast that to tick-tock a popular video showing up searching for QR nan and you see more than 74 million views on videos under that search term and if you look for hashtag wayfarer conspiracy what we've been talking about throughout the program again recommended hashtag 5g conspiracy so you can see how people can move from one conspiracy to another reverberating around echo chambers tick-tock actually saying to you news that the word conspiracy is what suggested this term but it's not just tick-tock and platforms now have a question about moderating their content and the difference between freedom of speech and moderation I spoke to Professor Hani for Reed who has studied the algorithm the effects of conspiracy theories and asked him whether we should be putting more emphasis more pressure on the business models of these platforms in the same way here in the u. s.
