Monday, October 12, 2020

Why Are Conspiracy Theories So Popular Now?

 This is actually a great question.

Right now in my opinion a variety of factors have combined to form a perfect storm of opportunities for conspiracy theories to bloom.

We have social media that is designed to promote the use of social media. So YouTube videos are fed to a consumer with the intent of promoting the watching of more videos. The algorithms that present suggested or auto play options ate designed to promote more and more intense emotional content, to inspire more videos being watched and this leads to the content getting more conspiracy theory intense. Conspiracy theory videos get people to watch for countless hours.

So, the media promotes this. The media wants as much data on you as possible so getting you to endlessly consume gives the media a lot of information on you, but it has to influence you to get the behavior it is designed to inspire and you don't just watch these videos endlessly, they inevitably influence your emotions, beliefs and behavior.

Additionally the conventional media has a series of problems undermining it.

The media has split into two main streams, the red feed of Fox news, two thousand right wing talk radio stations and so on are essentially pro Trump propaganda now and the blue feed of New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN and so on are the blue feed, what are called liberal media but would be more accurately called either neoliberal or pro capitalism.

The split has two factions and is relatively new and has the two sides each undermining the other.

Neither side is perfect or infallible and examples of each side being biased or downright dishonest can be found, though they are certainly not equal.

This further undermines their integrity.

Additionally we have a profound lack of education on important subjects such as civics, critical thinking, propaganda analysis, rhetoric and history and political science and economics so people are extremely vulnerable to false claims.

If our education on these topics was better or even existed at a basic level for most people then conspiracy theories would be much less likely to be believed in.

The general public has a very poor education on most of these topics and often has a lifestyle that is jam packed with information but most of it is not relevant to understanding these topics and if one just tries to sift out what is needed to understand the world by randomly taking on the information available OT is extremely likely to be unsuccessful.

We simply don't have the time to sift through all the information and most of us have obligations like jobs, families and sleep that make it very impractical.

To understand the topics necessary to understand conspiracy theories we need to have a good start and a curriculum of relevant information.

Fortunately for us there have been experts and scholars who have done work on relevant topics to help us to understand conspiracy theories and how to be less vulnerable to them. Obviously some conspiracies have been proven true by convincing evidence but the majority of conspiracy theories are not as well supported.

I have written extensively on critical thinking and think a good grounding in critical thinking is essential to understand conspiracy theories.

Critical Thinking

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