Tag: conspiracy theories
Good Luck Fighting Disinformation – The Atlantic
In April 2022, Nick Sawyer sat down before a committee of the California State Assembly to argue for legislation to help limit the spread of COVID falsehoods. Sawyer, an emergency-room physician, had become frustrated by what he saw as the failure of his profession to respond to doctors sharing false information about the pandemic. He’d co-founded an advocacy group, No License for Disinformation (NLFD), and now he was testifying in favor of legislation that warned doctors of professional consequences for
Is Kara Swisher Tearing Down Tech Billionaires—Or Burnishing Their Legends?
Few journalists and their sources have fallen out as completely as Kara Swisher and Elon Musk. The reporter met the future billionaire in the late 1990s, when she was a tech correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and he was just another Silicon Valley boy wonder. Over more than two decades, they developed a spiky but mutually useful relationship, conducted through informal emails and texts as well as public interviews.
Their frenemy shtick was on display, for example, when Swisher
The New American Nihilism – The Atlantic
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Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why people share conspiracy theories on the Internet. He and other researchers designed a study that involved showing American participants blatantly false stories about Democratic and Republican politicians, such as Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. The subjects
Trump Is Becoming Frighteningly Clear About What He Wants
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In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated hatred had led to death on a horrifying scale.
“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”
Ndahiro
“Sound of Freedom” Is a QAnon Fever Dream
The third-biggest movie of the summer is an action thriller about child sex trafficking that eagerly caters to right-wing paranoia.
The third-biggest movie of the summer is an action thriller about child sex trafficking that eagerly caters to right-wing paranoia.
As mid-century icons Barbie and Oppenheimer battle for summer box-office dominance, launching countless think pieces on gender, war, and gender war along the way, a very different sort of dramatic narrative has stormed red-state theater screens:
Is it possible that Facebook didn’t destroy American democracy?
“DEMOCRACY INTERCEPTED,” reads the headline of a new special package in the journal Science. “Did platform feeds sow the seeds of deep divisions during the 2020 US presidential election?” Big question. (Scary question!) The surprising answer, according to a group of studies out today in Science and Nature, two of the world’s most prestigious research journals, turns out to be something like: “Probably not, or not in any short-term way, but one can never really know
UFO Fever Is Taking Over Congress
Earlier today, three witnesses came before Congress to testify about their experiences with unidentified flying objects. A former Navy pilot spoke of the mysterious objects that he has seen with his own eyes and through radar, and how frequently pilots encounter them in the air. A retired Navy commander described the time he pulled his jet up to a Tic Tac–shaped object hovering over the ocean, then watched it suddenly speed up and vanish.
The most anticipated remarks, however, came
The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
In November, 2007, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, appeared on ABC News for one of those soft-focus get-to-know-the-candidate segments. Obama admitted that, after he was at Harvard Law School for a while and felt “comfortable” among his hyper-ambitious classmates, he allowed himself to think that maybe he’d run for President someday. “Did you think to yourself, Barack, what kind of hubris is this?” the broadcaster Charlie Gibson said.
“I think if you don’t have enough self-awareness to see
The Conspiracy Theory That Burned a Convent Down
The riot, when it finally happened, was a leisurely one. In the weeks leading up to August 11, 1834, the people of Boston had been openly discussing burning down the Ursuline Convent that stood just outside the city, in what is now Somerville. The convent, many had become convinced, was a den of sexual iniquity, where priests used the confessional as a mixture of blackmail and mind control to exert power over young women and force them into
The True-Crime Frenzy Surrounding the Idaho Murders
The reporters arrived in news vans and satellite trucks that trundled down King Road and colonized parking spots outside the crime scene. TV producers crowded into the Corner Club, chatting up students for tips and gossip, mispronouncing the town’s name—Mos-cow, they kept calling it, not Moss-coe. Nancy Grace, the cable-news host famously obsessed with morbid crimes, set up a table right outside the victims’ house so she could gesture at the building on air while speculating