The Eldorado of conspiracy
In the spread of the Pandemic, conspiracy has found its eldorado. It happened spontaneously and sometimes encouraged, in a crude and brutal way, even at the highest institutional levels. In the end it was seen that conspiracy theory can be a deadly political weapon in democracies where freedom of the press and of expression is one of the pillars of the system.
This matter is also nothing new. It would suffice to think how much the myth of the mutilated victory in Italy and the stab in the back in Germany contributed to the affirmation of fascism and Nazism in the period between the two wars.
But how can conspiracy theories take root, sometimes obviously absurd and devoid of any factual or simply logical basis?
An interesting approach
The cognitive bias approach that Manuela Cuadraro proposes in her second book, recently in the bookstore, is interesting. Beyond Covid. Beyond Covid. The open society and the future of the web (published by goWare). It is an essay with narrative inserts in which the author, who has personally gone through the ordeal of Covid, traces the multiple accelerations that the pandemic has impressed on the transition from the traditional economy and lifestyle to the new, disturbing and immature destination reality of cyberspace. How is it possible to maintain the open society and the progressive values that have characterized the development of modern democratic societies in this new dimension? This is the basic question that she seeks to answer the book.
Below we offer you an excerpt on a burning topical issue.
The deafening echo of buffaloes
The conspiracy was not born with Facebook. Every means of communication has always had "dwarfs" within it who, in exchange for a tray of biscuits, repeat aloud a script that has already been written.
Who hears those words, in turn repeats them, creating a sounding board as big as the world.
Rivers of ink have been poured into the dynamics underlying the spread of fake news lately. We are well aware that sociological factors contribute and above all cognitive bias, i.e. judgments or prejudices based on the interpretation of immediately available information, which is often not adequately investigated or logically correlated.
A “mental shortcut” (heuristics) which should help us make decisions quickly, and which instead too often makes us make missteps. It doesn't matter our level of education or the role we play in society: nobody is immune from this risk.
cognitive biases
That of cognitive bias It's a really broad topic that deserves to be explored further.[1] Here I would like to draw your attention to some of them, which are particularly useful for our subsequent reasoning:
1) Marching Band Bias: we all tend to run after the same "cart", that is, if a piece of news or an opinion shows that we already have a large number of followers, we are inclined to believe it more reliable. Those who have an opinion contrary to the masses therefore tend not to talk about it for fear of being ostracized by the majority (Spiral of Silence[2]);
2) Confirmation bias: we give greater credibility to news that confirm preconceived opinions, rather than those that could throw them into crisis. closely related tofrequency illusion, which leads us to notice what captures our thoughts in the reality around us (as happened to me in the days when I was evaluating whether or not to buy a Fiat 500 and I seemed to see them pop up at every intersection). Other connected bias is theostrich effect, which leads us to hide our heads in the sand whenever we are confronted with facts that prove the unreliability of our theories.
3) Anchor Bias: we take for granted the first information that is provided to us, relegating those that arrive later to the background (which is why the denials of any hoaxes are practically ignored);
4) Pattern illusion (or we could say "of the conspiracy"): we see correlations between absolutely unrelated facts;
5) Negativity bias: it leads us to give greater importance to negative news than positive news;
6) Magnitude (or order of magnitude) bias which makes it difficult for us to evaluate the numbers in their objective entity (are the migrants landed in Lampedusa many or few? Are the numbers of the Coronavirus infection worrying or not?)
7) Dunning-Kruger effect: it makes us overestimate our knowledge in a defined field, giving us the illusion that we have become experts. Like the no-vaxes attacking virologists. A presumption often connected to the lack of trust in consolidated knowledge and the figures connected to them (doctors, professors, etc.).
Information authority
I would also like to add an aspect that is often left in the background: theinformation authority which arises from the presumed neutrality of the technological means.
Let me explain.
How many times have we used the expression "I heard it on the radio" or "I read it on the Internet" or "I saw it on TV?"
Many. Yet they are basically incorrect: whatever we talk about, we didn't hear it "on the radio" but during radio program X broadcast by station Z and conducted by the nice Y; we didn't read it "on the internet" but on the ABC online magazine; we didn't see it on television but on the Sunday afternoon television show.
Yet all these details in our memory fade away, obscured by the medium itself. This is because "radio", "TV" or "internet" bring with them a semblance of objectivity that seems to give substance to our discourse, whatever turn we decide to give it.
Saying: "I heard it on Barbara d'Urso's show" or "I saw it on Report" creates two distinct contexts, which our interlocutor will take into consideration to form an opinion on what we are saying. If we evoke the medium, however, the context disappears. Only the content that we are reporting remains. And the more the technical functioning of the medium is unclear (see the story of the famous "dwarfs") the more we are inclined to make it relevant as a semantic container, because its authority cannot be denied.
Someone who knew how radio waves worked and how a real radio newsroom was organized would hardly have come to the small Sicilian inn.
Likewise, today it is very difficult to find someone who, despite using the internet and social media on a daily basis, is able to understand how they work on a technical level, and therefore understand according to which logic one piece of news appears in the Facebook stream and another does not.
Victims of the “Internet dwarfs”
For example, news like this:
Has this happened to you in streaming too? No wonder: in June 2020 it literally went around the web, relaunched by thousands of conspiracy theorists more or less aware of being such.
If the fake news of the period on the Spaniard made you smile, I bet that now the desire to laugh has passed[3].
Can you tell how did this news get under your eyes?
Can you indicate the original source?
Would you know how to verify if what is reported is, at least in part, true or not?
If not, then you too are victims of the “internet dwarfs”. Who unlike their radio ancestors, they don't just talk, but have also learned to listen to the speeches of the people sitting in the global inn. And that's where they get their inspiration from. In this way they become even more credible. And, with proper planning, viral.
The consequences of denialism
Let's take what happened in spring 2020 in the United States: many "deniers" began to spread content in which they defined the coronavirus as a hoax, citing reasons not too different from those of Spanish Fever.
The digital dwarfs have fanned the flames and bad politics has not missed an easy opportunity for consensus. A myopia that has led to a chain of actions so nefarious that they seem like the script of a bad eighties horror film: assaults on gun shops; Covid party to spread the "light" contagion; pseudo-home remedies for not "feeding" the hated pharmaceutical companies, such as injecting disinfectants into a vein, up to the publication of delusional videos in which the contagion containment measures, such as the obligation to wear masks, were presented as "the order of a communist dictatorship” and an offense to the nation's Christian values[4].
In short, the "skeptics” they churned out one conspiracy content after another and challenged COV Sars 2 to a virality contest.
Guess who won?
Actually you don't even need to guess, we read about it on the pages of the newspapers. The United States has had a frightening spread of the contagion, in June 2020 it had over 4 million sick people and 144 thousand dead and the numbers showed no signs of decreasing. But even in the face of this frightening evidence, the deniers persisted in their positions, despite the testimonies of some former acolytes of the conspiracy who, saved in extremis by doctors from the coronavirus or by some do-it-yourself remedy, publicly admitted that they were wrong.
The "dwarfs" of the Internet had cleverly used bias to create a self-perpetuating infodemic machine. How did they do it? Simple: by applying an old smuggler's trick.
Footnotes
[1] In this regard, the article on AgendaDigitale.eu by Daria Grimaldi, professor of social psychology of mass communications at the University of Naples Federico II is very interesting: https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/perche-ci-credo-la-credulita-online-come-strumento-di-influenza-sociale/ — Those who want to delve further will love "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" written by Daniel Kanheman with the collaboration of Amos Tversky and Paul Slovic, which, among other things, highlights the effects of these psychological dynamics on the real economy .
[2] The spiral of silence — Towards a theory of public opinion (2002) — by Elisabeth Noelle Neumann
[3] If you are interested in debunking, Giornalettismo has admirably "destroyed" this fake here: https://www.giornalettismo.com/influenza-spagnola-bufala-vaccino/
[4] In this video broadcast by the Telegraph you can find some of these ideas expressed by the voice of some citizens of the State of Florida during a meeting with local representatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaFSH0K4BdQ
Manuela Quadrado (Milan, 1980) has a degree in Languages. You have worked as a journalist and collaborated for years with various communication agencies and web agencies. Today she is account manager in Breva Digital Communication, which she helped found in 2014. She is part of the Naìma brain trust for business innovation. You collaborate with various educational realities, including the IDI Foundation and the Digital Professions Gym. For goWare in 2019 she also published Digital Marketing for the BtoB company.
